A friend stopped by the other evening with a packet of photos for a show-and-tell about his recent waterfowl hunting trip to North Dakota.  His journey to the northern prairies, the great breeding grounds of our migrant flocks, has become for him an annual event.  Each year on his return I look forward to his sporting tales.

This year’s hunt was different than last year, which was different than the year before, he related. He saw fewer ducks than in recent years, especially on sloughs visible from the road. The most common ducks on these key wetlands were shovelers and buffleheads.

The highlight of this year’s trip involved tundra swans. He had applied for and received a swan permit, allowing him to kill one bird. In the part of North Dakota where he hunts, he said, “You can’t believe the number of swans you see.”

My friend downed his trophy with one shot as it winged overhead. It was a passing shot, not a decoying bird. It added a new species to his lifetime list of waterfowl brought to bag. Each of his three companions also bagged a swan.

Swan populations in recent decades have exploded, allowing for a limited kill. A decade ago, when I lived in Maryland, tundra swans were commonplace in autumn and winter. They would arrive on Chesapeake Bay around November 10. I would frequently see hundreds of the big white birds feeding in one field. Maryland authorities did not allow swan hunting, even on a limited basis, fearing a public relations backlash from anti-hunters.

In the mid- to late-1800s swan hunting was part of our waterfowling tradition. Accounts from those times indicate the birds were exceedingly wary, as you might expect after getting fired upon by every Tom, Dick and Harry in the marsh.

Tundra swans, along with trumpeter swans, were protected by law with enactment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, allowing their beleaguered populations to slowly rebuild.

The act also protected mute swans, a non-native, feral species. These are descendants of swans imported from England to decorate our parks. They cause a lot of damage to aquatic vegetation and often drive away more desirable waterfowl. Various states have begun programs to reduce the number of mute swans. Also, mute swans are meaner than junkyard dogs, especially during the breeding season when they are incubating eggs or rearing their young. They often attack humans who innocently approach too closely.

Where I lived along the western shore of Chesapeake Bay, local residents often put out corn as food for wintering tundra swans. The migrants quickly identified each generous resident, flying from waterfront home to waterfront home. If the homeowner failed to put out corn at the appropriate hour, the swans would whoop and holler until the homeowner saw the error of his ways. These tundras devolved into welfare recipients with an attitude.

One of the most horrific swan stories I ever heard occurred in the 1950s and involved several teen-agers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. They illegally killed five or seven swans, cut off the heads and rolled them up in a small carpet. With great stealth, and late at night, they placed the rolled-up carpet in front of the storm door of the local game warden’s home, rang the doorbell and fled. The idea was that when the warden pushed opened the door, the carpet would unroll, exposing the illegal, bloody heads.

How do I know this story? Because it was told to me years after the event by one of the individuals involved. Not surprisingly, he was at the time a federal game warden.

After passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, swan hunting became a lost tradition, although you occasionally see in books old photos of hunters with dead swans killed for food during the Great Depression. As a kid, the only account I ever encountered of a hunter legally killing a swan involved the late Van Campen Heilner, a writer who in the 1930s was hunting in Europe along the Baltic where swans were legal game.

Nearly a quarter a century ago George Reiger, the long-time Field & Stream conservation columnist, and I entered our names and were successful in drawing permits to hunt swans in North Carolina. The permits allowed each of us to kill one swan.

I left my home in Maryland and picked up Reiger at his farm on the lower Eastern Shore of Virginia. We continued on to rural North Carolina where we met our two hosts. The next morning found us in low, heavily diked farm country. We set out snow goose decoys in corn stubble to attract the birds. I asked the local farmer when the swans would fly. “They begin at nine and fly all day,” he said. The locals referred to them as “sky carp.”

Indeed, right at nine o’clock swans began lifting off a nearby lake and flying inland to feed. They headed toward our decoys. We were hunkered down in a ditch and had decided to take turns, with only two of us firing at one time. Two quick tolls and four of us each had our one-swan limit. In less than 24 hours after leaving my driveway, I had killed my swan and was headed up the highway for home.

On the drive northward, I was reminded of Heilner’s account: “Today I shot a whooper swan. It was the first swan I had ever shot. It fell with a tremendous crash. The water spouted into the air like a geyser. But afterwards I felt ashamed. As it lay there in the Baltic, dying in circles, its beautiful snow white plumage all stained with crimson, I felt sick. I always wanted to shoot a swan and now I think I shall never want to shoot another.”

I had a similar reaction. I had always wanted to kill a swan, but did not feel sick or ashamed afterwards. My elation, however, quickly faded. I have never wanted to shoot another, although I took my bird to a taxidermist and displayed the mounted specimen for a couple of years in my home.

I am not a sentimentalist, nor are my waterfowl hunting friends.  But no waterfowl hunter of my acquaintance has ever killed a second swan.  I cannot explain the reason for this.  One swan, it seems, is enough for a lifetime.