Cops use bread and riot shields in desperate bid to contain crazed swan running amok in streets Tis a dowie day whin a swan cannae donder doon th' wynd wi'oot bein' pestered by th' polis. Bit that's dreich reality fur th' birds in Greenock, Inverclyde, according tae footage captured in th' toon this week. Yin wis unfortunate enough tae miss its regular landing pad o' Murdieston Pairk by some 200m, touching doon in …
Give it a few months and Scotland might be abroad. Particularly now we know they've got swans they're going to be inundated with hungry immigrants (DM link for irony)
"Frequently enough to not be a black swan event, then?"
So that would be several hundred times a day then?
Here in NZ black swans are not only common, they're considered to be a pest species - white swans on the other hand are very rare birds indeed and I haven't seen one of them in the wild for years.
"If it was a lairy toonser running amok, they would have Tazed the bas' and chooked 'em in a pond."
The thing is no one would have objected to that in the slightest, but whilst half an hour of shepherding with bread and riot shields is hilarious if anyone had harmed the swan or been harmed by the swan in any way there would be outcry.
It's also unfortunate that this comes out today, when Police Scotland have been complaining about budget shortfalls
They should eat grass and leaves only
It's not the gluten that's the problem - it's the amount of protein in the bread. Swans, being (mostly[1]) herbivourous can't cope with large amounts of protein in their diet and bread has surprising abouts of it. Same for ducks - and because they are much smaller than swans, the effects are magnified.
And they don't really eat grass and leaves - they mostly eat water weed. The ones that eat grass extenively are geese. We give our local waterbirds a mix of sweetcorn (off the cob obviously), lettuce and sunflower kernels. They tend to ignore the lettuce..
[1] When they snack on water weed, they are quite happy to incude the small crustaceans/invertibrates living on said weed. And when the adults have cygnets around then both adults and cygnets need more protein in their diets to help the cygnets grow quickly so they will explicitly eat more molluscs and invertibrates.
Apparently that's an Urban Myth, and swans are actually starving to death because people have stopped feeding them bread because of it.
https://www.inyourarea.co.uk/news/readings-swans-may-not-survive-the-winter/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-berkshire-46440809/animal-welfare-starving-swans-can-be-fed-bread
Well the eating of swans was removed from the Treason Act (1351) in an amendment in 1998, but the killing of a swan comes under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act anyway. As the Crown owns all unmarked swans, it's only legal to eat one with a swan mark, and as the swans on the Thames at least are owned by either the Queen or the Vintners and Dyers city livery companies, you would have to be a member or guest of one of those guilds to sample the delicacy. There are other privately owned swans elsewhere in the UK. Makes me wonder what happens when the birds move around.
£200K if...
-the vans were bought specially for this incident, and were destroyed immediately afterwards
-the 2-3 coppers were paid their annual salary to do just this one call-out, and haven’t done anything else before or since.
Bad mathematics indeed, but not so much Daily Mail, more Diane Abbott.
Aye, the best laugh about the 'Jockinese' they used in TFA is that nae fucker in Greenock speaks a dialect which even remotely resembles it¹..the current one here's a bit like that o' the weegies, but no quite the same...
¹. Ok, someone somewhere locally probably does, the place being the increasingly fun melting pot that it is, there's a small chance of someone speaking such a bastardised pseudo-Broonish dialect (probably living in the tunnels with the Catman) also doubly helped by Greenock being adjunct to good old Innsmouth-on-the-Clyde (aka Port Glasgow) and the weirdos that place has attracted from all over Scotland since its unholy birth², but honestly, there's no enough man³, pal, bastardin', fuckin' and cuntin' in the spiel used for it to be authentic Greenock..
². I should know, some of my ancestors moved down from Govan to the Port shortly after the place was founded...
³. The standard call of the widely spotted Junkiejakeybastardicus greenockii, oft heard echoing plaintively round the immediate environs of the empty Oak Mall 'man man man hey big yin man man man gonnie gies some money fur ma bus fare man man man...man']
Could have been worse, the swan could have come to Bristol.
Someone (and the last I heard nobody knew who exactly) in Bowness on Windermere put up a sign saying "please do not feed bread to the swans" (or similar) and the swans took exception to it. They promptly decamped from the lakeside and marched (slowly!) the 100 - 200 yards into the town and parked themselves outside takeaways, foodshops (inc Tesco, I believe) and more or less demanded food with menaces.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again...
Hated them bastards since the day when a much younger Kiwi got thrown off his bike by one that wandered in front of it. I desperately turned left to dodge, the swan went left, I threw the handlebars right, the swan turned and went right. BLAM. I went over the bars but luckily was able to stop myself with my bare hands and face on a convenient patch of gravel. My bike had the front forks bent and was un-ridable. The swan on the other hand, hissed at me and wandered off to go cripple someone else.
Police should have shot this one.
Many Americans will have read Make Way for Ducklings to their children, or had it read them when children themselves. For those who do not know, it includes some of the Boston police force (with suitably Irish names, as I recall), clearing a way for ducks and ducklings to move into the public gardens. There was no speculation on the cost to the taxpayer, though.
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