By Roger Di Silvestro
Photographs by Alexander Badyaev
WHEN LEWIS AND CLARK passed through Montana’s Blackfoot River Valley in 1806, they reported seeing flocks of trumpeter swans. In roughly another 100 years, the trumpeter—the largest waterfowl species in the world, with a wingspan close to 7 feet—was extinct in the valley. Market hunters, killing the birds for meat and for feathers used in the fashion industry, wiped out the species across much of its original range in the Lower 48, which stretched from Wisconsin to the Pacific Northwest. By the 1930s, fewer than 70 survived in the Lower 48, along with a few thousand in parts of Alaska and western Canada.
In 2005, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and various private groups, began to release juvenile trumpeters hatched in other populations into the Blackfoot River Valley—a large stretch of uniquely suitable wetland habitat. By 2011, state biologists had released some 140 of them. That year, one pair returned from wintering grounds, laid a clutch of eggs and produced three cygnets, the first to hatch in the valley in more than a century.
Alexander Badyaev, a biologist at the University of Arizona who conducts long-term ecological studies throughout Montana, has been documenting the birds’ progress, photographing them since 2005 at the request of the state wildlife agency. To capture images of the first successful hatching, he had to take extra precautions against frightening the wary birds. He would arrive at about 2 a.m. at the wetland where they nested, take a long hike to a spot where he could lie in a shallow depression an appropriate distance from the nest and cover himself with dirt, grass and twigs. “You have to be absolutely motionlesswhen the adults look around at twilight, which is annoying if you happen to have a few dozen mosquitoes on your face,” he says, “but a greater concern on two occasions was a grizzly with her two cubs walking around while I was lying invisible and motionless.” At first light, the adults would lead the cygnets from the nest, not to return until evening. Badyaev had to remain in position until the birds were out of sight, “which could take hours.” . . .
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