The black swan

It’s been wet, wild and wintery the last few days, and I like to remind myself that spring is around the corner with photos of baby animals from last year. So here we have a black swan (Cygnus atratus) with cygnet. The black swan has a rather confusing history in New Zealand. Black swans are widespread in Southeast Asia and Australia, and were introduced to New Zealand in the 1860s. In 1889, bones of a “New Zealand swan” were discovered in a cave in the Christchurch suburb of Sumner. The New Zealand swan and the black swan were regarded as separate as the New Zealand birds had slightly larger bones than the Australian ones. A study in 1998, however, concluded that the New Zealand swan was simply an isolated population of the Australian species that had been hunted to extinction before Europeans arrived. Then in 2017, a genetic analysis of fossils found that the New Zealand birds were, in fact, a separate species.