Swan Lake: An Irish Ballet

By Simi Kumar and Gunter Rau

The survey of wild swans is a study of their social family life over years to describe their annual circle of mating, nesting, feeding, caring, and protecting the cygnets. Swans live in monogamy and stay on lakes they choose for life. It was therefore possible to give them names and watch their family fate, which is at great risk for the young baby swans to survive the many attacks of all kinds of predators. The book contains over 160 photo documents of all the important steps of growing up a family with so much intensive care of the parents, which was so far unknown. It is a wonderful performance of love, beauty, and unfortunately drama included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504942720

Simi Kumar

Dr. Gunter Rau, retired museum director and university lecturer in Germany, is author of many books and articles about archeology, ancient glass, social history, and anthology. His latest publications are about protection of wildlife, survey and studies of wild swans in Ireland, his second residence.

Book preview

AuthorHouse™ UK

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

© 2015 Gunter Rau. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 6/12/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4269-0 (sc)

       978-1-5049-4272-0 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

21742.png

Contents

FOREWORD

ODETTE

LOUISA

MANON

IULIA

ODILE

OPHELIA

LOUGH SKEAN

LOUGH MEELAGH

FLYING STUDIES

AFTERWORD

FOREWORD

The first volume of my survey on Irish swans was printed in 2013 and is a compendium of family and social life of wild swans. It started with my love to ODETTE – a female swan, like the princess in Tchaikovsky’s ballet – who I found on an Irish lake, haplessly trying to save her nest in the rising flood of icy spring storms. I saved and incubated her eggs to hatch 2 cygnets at home. When I brought them back to the lake ODETTE adopted them and they grew into beautiful young swans that flew in freedom in the winter of 2013/14.

New%20Image0.tif

During my survey 2014, on 6 Irish lakes, I named the lady-swans and their names appear as headings on every page, in the following order: ODETTE - LOUISA - MANON - IULIA - ODILE - OPHELIA. Swans are monogamous and live often alone, on smaller lakes, all their life.

My continued studies in 2014 ended in a very sad result of a loss of baby-cygnets up to 90 %, including all of ODETTE. Of the 6 families, only one was able to protect and save 3 cygnets in this summer. I followed happiness and tragedies as