Of Birds and Barley
WAIT HERE A SECOND.” Dagbjartur shifts the lumbering Jeep to neutral and steps out to pick some barley from his field. He rubs an ear between his thumb and forefinger. “Almost ready,” he announces, as much to himself as to us. I lean forward from the back seat, entranced by the contrast between the delicate autumn-green ear of grain and the weather-worked hand that cradles it. Then I realize Dagbjartur and Edda are laughing. The laughter is because I am taking a photo.
“Oh, these city children,” Edda teases.
“It’s supposed to be hard inside,” Dagbjartur says, tasting the grain. “That’s what the swans go crazy about. There’s the kernel.”
“Yes, that’s what we eat,” Edda says.
“It is,” Dagbjartur confirms. “That is to say, it’s good.” Edda and I chuckle at the suggestion of the swans’ refined taste.
We’re all sampling the barley now. The underripe nutty flavor leaves a bitterness on my tongue as I gaze out at the field, enclosed within electric fences under the watch of a makeshift scarecrow. There’s the kernel, indeed. This is what all the fuss is about.
DAGBJARTUR is one of a number of farmers who spoke with my advisors and me about the so-called plague of swans in southern Iceland. We had sought them out to understand how these birds have turned from beauties into beasts.
Iceland’s only swan species, the whooper, is a populous, widely distributed, and highly adaptable migratory bird that falls under international protection. Once hunted by Icelanders for meat and feathers, it was granted local protection in 1914, as part of a broader piece of wildlife conservation legislation. The government’s justification, however, was not that they were preserving an animal nearing extinction, but rather that it was “an exceedingly beautiful part of Icelandic birdlife” they hoped might become “tamer and more common.” Those hopes have certainly been fulfilled: the Icelandic whooper swan population has nearly doubled in the last twenty-five years, now comprising over thirty-four thousand individuals. This population trend can be largely attributed to the climate crisis—warmer, more favorable conditions in Icelandic nesting grounds fostering greater breeding success and higher survival rates—and the recent cultivation of barley, the taste of which seems, to swans, to be irresistible.
It’s the whoopers’ appetite for barley—grown in Iceland almost exclusively as livestock fodder—that has caused some to see them as a nuisance. After ongoing complaints from farmers about damage inflicted to crops by swans, the Farmers Association of Iceland began quantifying these losses. The data, however, must be read with caution, as an ecologist at the Icelandic Institute of Natural History warned me: the issue has still
