In Western Australia's South West, a dedicated group of volunteers is racing against time to save hundreds of stranded cygnets each summer. But this isn't just a local story; it's a tale of a changing climate and its impact on one of Australia's most beloved birds. As the climate dries out, the delicate balance of nature is thrown off, leaving these young swans vulnerable and in need of rescue.
For Brad Fish, the story began when he was just eight years old. He witnessed a family friend nursing a lost cygnet back to health, an experience that ignited a lifelong passion for conservation. Now, more than 50 years later, Fish is part of a volunteer effort rescuing hundreds of Black Swans each summer. On Saturday, he released 26 healthy cygnets into the Leschenault Estuary, 220 kilometres south of Perth, watching some of them take flight for the first time.
But Fish worries that without more rescuers and carers, the South West swan population could soon dwindle. An increasingly dry climate is forcing adult birds to abandon their young in search of a better food source, leaving flocks of baby swans, known as cygnets, to fend for themselves. When cygnets are abandoned by their parents, they often migrate away from wetlands in search of water, finding themselves in the ocean and unable to fly against strong winds or swim against currents.
It is up to people like Fish and his volunteers, in collaboration with wildlife organisation Geo Bay Wildlife Rescue, to head out to sea and scoop them up. The team is now being called out on a daily basis, with Fish saying they have rescued 200 so far this year, and 400 last season. "It fluctuates; you might get 30 one day and five the next, but they just keep popping up," he said. "There's no food in the ocean, they're a grass-eating bird ... that's why we don't see birds nesting by the ocean, they don't belong there."
The problem is compounded by the changing climate. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the South West experienced a steady rise in average maximum temperatures and a decrease in total average rainfall over the 30-years leading up to 2023. This has a direct impact on the survival rates of black swan fledglings, as Bunbury resident Sue Kalab, a volunteer with Birdlife Australia for more than 30 years, explains. "We're getting late winter rains and early summers," she said. "Cygnets need to be fully fledged by December because the lakes, wetlands, creeks and billabongs are all drying out. It leaves late fledgling cygnets stranded … dehydrated, starving and having to cross busy roads."
The changing landscape has also displaced countless bird species. "There's been so much drainage and development, and so the natural landscape has been disadvantaged severely," Kalab said. Jeaninne Ennis, a wildlife volunteer for four years, vividly remembers the first time she helped to release birds. "Well, the first one I did, I cried," she said. "It's always beautiful seeing them and if they try to fly."
Ennis's role is to monitor the health of cygnets post-release. "We probably come every second day to check them out," she said. "Then later in the season, we will probably check on them every day because there are foxes, feral cats, dogs that are not kept on leashes and who attack wildlife." Fish said the sheer numbers made the work "really difficult" for the small cohort of volunteers but he hopes this will change. "A lot of people were left exhausted at the end of last year's season, but we got through it and we were determined that we were going to turn that around this year," he said. "We need carers and we need people with dinghies we can train to catch these birds. There's so much effort that goes into such a few, so we just need more numbers to take the load off because this is not something that we're going to fix in a year or two."
But here's where it gets controversial... Some argue that the swan population is not in danger and that the volunteers are doing more harm than good. They believe that the swans are adapting to the changing climate and that the volunteers are disrupting the natural selection process. And this is the part most people miss... While the volunteers' efforts are crucial in saving individual swans, the long-term solution lies in addressing the root cause of the problem: the changing climate. The volunteers' work is a temporary fix, and without broader action to combat climate change, the swan population may continue to struggle.
