Rare trumpeter swans find refuge in Lake Champlain, exciting birders

By MICHAEL FRETT
Islander Staff Writer
ALBURGH – The Champlain Islands have some new celebrities.
Among the islands’ birdwatching community, a new family of trumpeter swans have become the stars of the day, their snow-white plumage popping out against the gray, December waters of Lake Champlain.
Regular Islander readers will recognize the three birds from last week’s cover photo courtesy of Alburgh’s Cathy Bohannon. Birdwatchers, including those volunteering with the annual Christmas Bird Count, have recently sighted the swans bobbing atop Lake Champlain near Alburgh, Isle La Motte and North Hero.
“Look what we found on Sunday!” Terry Marron, a birdwatcher who helps coordinate Audubon Vermont’s annual Christmas Bird Count in Northwest Vermont, wrote in a message to The Islander after sharing photos of the three swans taken during Sunday’s count near Stephenson’s Point in North Hero.
“We were so surprised to see them here since they had been on the other side of the island and the wind was pretty strong on the east side,” Marron said.
Fellow birdwatchers Sarah Rosedahl and Robert Salter also shared photos with The Islander, having tracked the three birds – two adults and an adolescent – between North Hero and Isle La Motte.
Trumpeter swans are a rare sight in Vermont, their typical range usually only reaching as far east as Lake Ontario. According to the National Audubon Society, observers are far more likely to find the bird on either the Pacific Coast between Oregon and Alaska, and in pockets in the Midwest and Great Plains.
Boasting a bugle-like call, trumpeter swans are the continent’s largest species of waterfowl and its heaviest flying bird. Trumpeter swans are generally identified by their size and by their black, pointed bill, features distinguishing the bird from the tundra swans birdwatchers can sometimes mistake for much larger trumpeter swans.
According to Mark LaBarr, a conservation biologist with Audubon Vermont, while trumpeter swans are rare to Vermont, it was common for the occasional rare bird to find refuge in the Green Mountain State.
​Lake Champlain in particular, according to LaBarr, offered a strong refuge for some birds, its blend of habitats ranging from deeper waters to shallow inlets and wetlands offering a spread of hiding places and feeding grounds for peculiar birds knocked off course from their usual migratory routes.
“The lake, just being the lake, has the opportunity to attract birds that either move through here on migration or lose their way and are looking for a refuge of sorts,” LaBarr recently told The Islander. “It’s conducive to seeing a strange bird once in a while.”
Islander readers might recognize a few of these strange visitors.
In 2019, an American white pelican was swept into Lake Champlain and became a part time fixture in North Hero, a far cry from its typical migratory route between the Northern Great Plains in Canada and waters near Mexico. Last summer, birdwatchers again flocked to North Hero after a marbled godwit, a Great Plains shorebird, was spied prowling Goose Island near the town’s village center.
More often than not, newcomers to Lake Champlain are only temporary visitors. The pelican stunning birdwatchers in 2019 eventually moved on, for example, and Vermont wildlife officials later confirmed that North Hero’s marbled godwit had died of natural causes likely brought by the shorebird’s inability to adapt to a new home in Vermont.
At times, however, visitors have become permanent.
According to the Vermont Atlas of Life, the ring-billed gull, now a ubiquitous sight in the Champlain Valley, was only first observed nesting on Lake Champlain as recently as the 1940s. More recent decades have brought the Caspian tern and double-crested cormorant to the lake, as well, drawn by its habitat variety and food sources like the schools of alewives that invaded Lake Champlain in the early 2000s.
For Lake Champlain’s new swans, the new home is probably temporary, likely a refuge after powerful snowstorms bombarded their native range in the Midwest and Northeast in early December. For the past decade, birdwatchers have observed the occasional trumpeter swan in parts of Vermont, and there remains no evidence that any of those birds have made Vermont a permanent part of their migration.
However, according to LaBarr, the combination of part-time visitors like trumpeter swans and new arrivals like the Caspian tern can help paint a picture of a remarkably flexible Lake Champlain ecosystem particularly for birds, whose ability to fly and frequent migrations mean birds are far more likely to move between environments as those environments change.
Those shifts might become more pronounced, too, as the climate continues to change, according to LaBarr. Evolving and intensifying weather patterns like those bringing heavy storms and droughts to different parts of North America could push more birds into the Champlain Valley, according to LaBarr, meaning temporary refugees like trumpeter swans could become more common.
“Certainly, with these weather patterns happening, I think the ability to see these birds can become more common,” LaBarr said. “It does open an opportunity for species we don’t normally see.”
The changing climate will also likely affect what birds settle into the Champlain Valley for good, too.
According to Audubon Vermont and the Vermont Climate Assessment, a University of Vermont report detailing the likely impacts of climate change in Vermont, species typically associated with states to Vermont’s south, like the red-bellied woodpecker and tufted titmouse, have already become more common in the Green Mountain State.
Other species, including summertime mainstays like the common loon, were likely to see their ranges pushed out of Vermont altogether as summers become increasingly warm and conditions become less able to support certain birds, according to the Vermont Climate Assessment and Audubon Vermont.
According to Audubon Vermont, six bird species native to Vermont were considered “highly vulnerable” to climate change and another 68 species were considered “moderately vulnerable” should countries eventually limit global warming to only two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the goal outlined under the internationally recognized Paris Climate Agreement.
For conservationists like LaBarr, the changing climate is already affecting how conservation projects are managed. According to LaBarr, organizations like Audubon Vermont are now thinking ahead when they preserve land, with their focus often falling not only on the birds currently living in Vermont, but the birds that might move into the Green Mountain State as its summers and winters warm.
“Birds may lose, but there are some species that may benefit,” LaBarr said. “We do a lot of habitat management, and we’re not looking to manage for now, but for the birds we’ll see 20 years from now.”
In the meantime, however, bird enthusiasts, including LaBarr and other conservationists working with Audubon Vermont, celebrated the stray swan sightings now lighting up the islands’ birding community.
“It’s a place where some interesting birds can pop up, for sure,” LaBarr told The Islander.

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