A Chorus Line

Filming in the fog is not the worse thing that can happen.  It reduces the range of tones between the lightest and darkest areas making them much more manageable and making it easier to not blow out the whites, which would render them featureless. Sunny days would be the most difficult on which to film and cloudy days would probably be best. 

I chose this picture because it shows two adults (pure white) and two pairs of cygnets in different stages of development.  The two on the right are almost ready to turn pure white. They are more mature than the two with the grayish heads and were probably born a year earlier. 

It amazes me that they could travel all the way from northern Alaska without being separated. Think of all the things that could cause a mated pair of adults or the parents and children to be separated. It isn't like they can pick up a cell phone and say, "Hey, where are you?" I would think once separated there would be very little chance of being reunited.  And yet, here they are. Much of the swan population migrate all the way to the East Coast to spend their "vacation." 

Perhaps if you lived at "the pond" you would become enamored to the voice of the Tundra Swan, but I thought they sounded wonderful. Without even trying, they are very LOUD. Have you ever met someone with a foghorn for a voice, someone whose voice just naturally projects in an abnormally loud way? My wife and I had a downstairs neighbor like that once.  She could talk in a normal voice and you could hear her right through the floor.  That is the way these swans are. They can give one little bark barely opening their mouth more than the second one on the right and it carries all over the area like they were standing right next to you. I had to look closely to see which swan would be barking because they can do it so effortlessly. And it does, at times, sound like a bark. In fact, they have been mistaken for a pack of baying hounds hunting.

Most of the time they are spread out over the pond individually with their heads below water. Then, one will get to singing and pretty soon there are more joining in and they all decide to get into a chorus and sing tunes from Les Miz.  That goes on for a while and then its back to eating again. I wish you could hear them. Kind of like a goose but much more melancholy and melodious and very acoustical in quality. You might be able to find a sound recording through Google if you were interested. Its worth searching out.

This one got to singing off key and it upset the choral director. Actually, I think at times, the adults put the youngsters in their place. I think the gray-headed young belong to the white one and she/he was protecting them from the one on the right. Of course, I was upset too that I wasn't getting those nice serene shots of them doing nothing more than swimming around. Yeah, right.