The pond behind our house is famous locally for its swans, which come here every year to raise a family. Normally, anyway.
They didn’t settle in last year, because the fields around the pond were full of some very obstreperous horses which kept wading into the reeds and disturbing the nesting mother. They didn’t nest the year before that, either, as workers nearby were planting trees in the adjacent field for several days, and the swans got spooked.
For the past few weeks we’ve seen one swan out on the pond, or wandering around up in the grass when the horses (thery’re here again) weren’t around. Our early theory was that this was a youngster of an earlier hatching, told to go off elsewhere by his parents, who were probably nesting in the lake over in the Demesne. But a few days ago Peter caught a flash of something white in the reeds — and yesterday I saw her myself: the second swan, on the nest. So it’s really spring now, and all things are right with the world…
(By the way, if the image to the right doesn’t look quite crisp, that’s because it’s been rendered as a watercolor using the Fo2Pix “buZZ” plugin for Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Photoshop. We normally use a larger version of this image as a general-purpose note card.)
