An angry swan is capable of inflicting a nasty blow with its powerful wings. It is said to be able to use these with such force as to break a man’s arm. Mr. Kay Robinson denies this, and declares that the wing of a swan is not a formidable weapon. Personally, I always give the wing the benefit of the doubt and an angry swan a wide berth.
Considering its size, the swan has a very small brain; hence it is not overburdened with intelligence. Mr. H. E. Watson relates how one day when shooting in Sind he came across five swans on a tank. “They let the boat get pretty close,” he writes, “and I shot one. The other four flew round the tank a few times and then settled on it again. I went up in the boat and fired again, but without effect. They flew round, and then settled again. The third time I shot another; the three remaining again flew round and settled, and the fourth time I fired I did not kill. Exactly the same thing happened the fifth time; the birds flew round and round, and settled close to me, and I shot a third. The remaining two flew a little distance, and settled, but I thought it would be a pity to kill them . . . so I began to shoot ducks, and then the two remaining swans flew by me, one on the right and one on the left, so that I could easily have knocked them over with small shot.” What a pity swans are such rare visitors to India! What grand birds they must be for an indifferent shot. One swan on a small _jhil_ would give a really bad gunner a whole morning’s shooting; it would circle round and round the sportsman at short range, letting him blaze off to his heart’s content until it fell a victim to its trustfulness! Try to imagine the so-called stupid goose behaving in this manner.
The swan is a very silent bird in captivity, for this reason it is called the mute swan. The only noise I have ever heard it make is a hiss when it is angry. At the breeding season it is said to trumpet sometimes. The ancients believed that the swan, though mute throughout life, sings most sublimely at the approach of death; it then sings, not a funeral dirge, but a jolly, rollicking song. This presented an excellent opportunity for moralising. Mediæval authors were always on the look out for such opportunities. The swan, wrote the author of the _Speculum Mundi_, “is a perfect emblem and pattern to us, that our death ought to be cheerful, and life not so dear to us as it is.” This practice of singing before death has, like the crinoline, quite gone out of fashion. The mute swan can never have been so great a musician as some of his brethren, since the French horn which he carries in his breast-bone is not nearly so well developed as it is in either the hooper or the black swan. Let me here say, _en passant_, that both ancient and mediæval writers declined to believe in the existence of a black swan; they regarded it as “the very emblem and type of extravagant impossibility.” The phœnix, the dragon, and the mermaid they could believe, but they felt that they must really draw the line at a black swan.