Flight Of The Swans

This morning I had to get up early and leave for Slimbridge WWT as I was going to a talk by Ben Cherry, a young environmental photographer and wildlife film maker. He was on the Flight Of The Swans media team. Flight Of The Swans is a conservation project looking into the decline in numbers of Bewick's swans. In 2016 Sacha Dench who works for the WWT flew in a parormottor with swans from Russia to the UK to find out the migration route of the Bewick's swans and identify the dangers they faced which could be accounting for their decline. The talk by Ben today was focusing on his role as a media specialist. His aim on the journey was to publicise the flight and raise public awareness of the Bewick's swans. During Sacha's Journey Ben filmed and also created a live map so viewers could track the swans, Sacha and the team vehicles. He put regular updates on Facebook and other social media sites in order to gain as much public interest as possible.

After the talk I went to find the Bewick's swans which are staying at Slimbridge over the winter. I went into a bird hide overlooking a lake and noticed that a swan had a tracker collar on. A volunteer told me that the swan was called Maisie. Amazingly, Maisie had been recorded in The Netherlands just a few days ago and this morning at 10 o clock she was in Norfolk at a different WWT reserve, by lunchtime she had arrived in Slimbridge so during the morning she had flown around 170 miles with her partner, the same journey by car would take about 3 hours.