♪♪ [ Swans honking faintly ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Honking ] Narrator: It is November in Northwest Washington's Skagit Valley.

Flocks of trumpeter swans have arrived here.

They have flown over 2,000 miles on the annual migration from their summer breeding grounds across Northern Alaska, the Yukon Territory and Northwest British Columbia.

Standing up to 4 feet tall with an impressive wingspan of nearly 8 feet, the trumpeter swan is the largest waterfowl in North America.

Over 10,000 will migrate here, making it the largest wintering congregation on the continent.

With its warmer climate, wetlands, and rural farmlands, the Skagit Valley offers the swans an ideal winter habitat.

[ Honking ] The relationship of agriculture and conservation plays an important role in the lives of these swans and other wintering waterfowl, who rely on the abundant corn, potatoes, and wheat in the open fields to survive the winter.

For the trumpeter swans who have migrated here, they are about to find out the valley is also a major wintering ground for one of the most abundant waterfowl species in the world... [ Birds squawking ] ♪♪ ...snow geese.

Over 50,000 will migrate here, providing a spectacular aerial display.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Gillette: Most waterfall are migratory.

The states, the provinces, the federal governments realized early on that in order to manage them effectively, they had to do it in a cooperative venture.

And when they looked in terms of where the birds migrated, there was basically four flyways -- the Atlantic, the Mississippi, the Central and the Pacific.

And so they set up these four working groups consisting of biologists from the various states and provinces in the federal government to work collaboratively in the management of waterfall species.

Narrator: In late March, the wintering trumpeter swans in the Skagit Valley begin their migration north along the Pacific flyway.

Most will travel through Northwestern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory on their journey to Alaska.

♪♪ ♪♪ Every April in the small community of Marsh Lake, Yukon, local residents and visitors welcome the swans' arrival during the Yukon's premiere birding festival, the Celebration of Swans.

Up to 3,000 swans gather on McClintock Bay to feed and rest before continuing their migration north.

♪♪ ♪♪ They belong to the Pacific Coast population, one of three populations across North America.

The Pacific Coast population is made up of flocks that breed in Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and Northwest British Columbia.

The Rocky Mountain population is made up of three distinct flocks, a large Northwestern Canadian flock that breeds in Canada, a tri-state, greater Yellowstone flock that breeds in the greater Yellowstone region, and a group of smaller restoration flocks across Oregon, Nevada, Washington, and Montana.

The interior population includes two primary flocks, one in the Central Flyway, known as the High Plains Flock, and a much larger flock in the Mississippi and Atlantic Flyways.

The historic breeding and wintering range of trumpeter swans once covered much of North America.

La Salle was sailing up Lake Erie and the Detroit River and up into through Lake Huron into Lake Superior, and he says that as they went up the Detroit River and were going through Lake Sinclair, that there were a lot of swans.

The swans were so abundant that they might be taken for lilies.

Think of a lily bed that you see in a lake up here, and this is what he compared them with.

There were a lot of swans.

Narrator: But that would all change.

Their large size, conspicuous white plumage, and thick down contributed to the historic demise of trumpeter swans.

Subsistence use of swans as food by Native Americans would have occurred for thousands of years without threatening the species, but with the influx of fur trappers and settlers with firearms across North America, the swans were an easy target, providing fresh meat.

With over 125 years of commercial swan skin harvested by hunters and trappers for the Hudson's Bay Company, the trumpeter swan population was decimated.

Fearing the species was doomed to extinction, the National Park Service took action, and in 1929, conducted the first detailed studies of nesting trumpeter swans.

Leading the study was biologist and wilderness conservation pioneer George Melendez Wright.

I read through his journals, some of them, and he was at the same lakes that I was at during my master's work.

He wrote the first description of swans in Yellowstone and the first data, and he had a couple of his colleagues working to collect where they were nesting.

Nothing was known then, and he's describing the same lakes that I'm going to.

You know, he felt alive to me, but I had not really appreciated that here he is in the late '20s, early '30s.

He insisted on taking an ecosystem approach.

Matter-of-factly saying, "You can't."

I mean, animals don't see boundaries, jurisdictional boundaries.

You can't manage them that way.

And that was probably, more than anything else, the most striking thing to see, Hey, you know, he understood the animals.

Narrator: By 1932, Wright and his team had found only 69 swans remaining in the United States.

They were primarily in the remote areas of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Red Rock Lakes region of Montana Centennial Valley.

The studies revealed that illegal shooting in areas near Yellowstone was imperiling this last remnant.

Determined to halt this, Wright launched a public campaign to save the remaining trumpeters by creating a wildlife refuge at Red Rock Lakes.

Wright's efforts culminated in 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Red Rock Lakes Migratory Waterfowl Refuge.

Sadly, this was one of George Melendez Wright's final landmark accomplishments.

In 1936, at the age of 31, George Melendez Wright lost his life in a tragic automobile accident.

♪♪ Shea: He was in charge of the Wildlife Division of the Park Service.

He had written many very detailed scientific reports.

He was an expert on Yosemite, on Yellowstone, on swans, and he helped create Red Rock Refuge.

And I mean, he was my hero.

[ Voice breaking ] But it's also humbling to think, gee, what was I doing after six years on swans compared to, I mean...

He had to have been a genius, just an absolute genius, as well as a great observer.

It's just stunning what he did in such a short few years.

Narrator: With the refuge offering protection and isolation, the fragile trumpeter swan population began to increase slowly and steadily.

Gillette: The initial pair we got was in 1966.

The park district had received 42 trumpeter swans from Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

These were wild birds.

They were captured in the wild and shipped here.

They were following a restoration plan that was done out at Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge where they did the same thing.

However, Lacreek is a very remote isolated area.

Minneapolis and the area around Minneapolis is certainly not that.

The initial attempt was simply to release them into the wild following procedures that had been used in more remote areas, but it did not succeed.

By the time I arrived here, they were down to just 13 birds, and had changed the direction of the program so that they decided they were going to be raising the birds for release in captivity.

And I think this was a very smart move, because the birds coming from Red Rocks were not habituated to the human presence that they found here in Minnesota and in Minneapolis area.

Narrator: Meanwhile, an aerial survey of Alaska's remote Copper River Delta led to the surprise discovery of an unknown group of nesting trumpeter swans.

That discovery led to the first range-wide census of trumpeter swans in Alaska conducted in 1968.

Coordinating the effort was pioneer biologist and pilot Jim King.

All the waterfowl, you could identify from 100 feet, the ducks, the geese and the swans.

They lend themselves to observation from an airplane, and that's what I did a lot of.

If you're going to study birds from the air, the best bird you can study is the swan.

It's a big white blot on the terrain, and when the plane goes over, the swans in the summertime will go into a threat posture.

They're telling flying things, "This is my territory, and don't you land here."

And they do it in a way that even airplane pilots can understand, if you land, you're going to get attacked.

Narrator: Results of the survey, in the words of King, caused a bit of a stir.

King and his team had counted over 20,800 trumpeters, providing a glimmer of hope to the limited, highly vulnerable population.

This opened the door for numerous Midwest state and province restoration programs in the 1980s, using eggs from Alaska.

I was involved with putting together the plan for trumpeter swan restoration.

When we first wrote the plan in 1982, we were following all the proper protocol for the biology, the science, what it takes to make swans come back, and we were doing our best, since we were the first state in the Midwest to actually initiate a trumpeter swan restoration program.

We made the egg collections in Alaska.

We brought the eggs back, we hatched them, we reared them.

To me, this was, personally, the right thing to do to bring back an extirpated species.

Then I was supposed to go up to Monticello, where the swans were wintering on the Mississippi River.

But I got the forecast the night before, and it was going to be -25 that morning.

But I didn't have the phone number for the cinematographer, Larry Duke.

I thought, "Oh, I guess we have to go anyway."

So we went anyway.

We got there, and it was the most magic scene of swans, because most of the river had frozen over.

They were all huddled together, several dozen birds in a little group.

They had kept the water open overnight right next to the shore, and they were all huddled up with their bills stuck under their wing coverts, and the fog was rising off that little bit of water.

Where it was rising, the fog was creating hoarfrost on the tree branches overhead.

And then when the sun came up, the sun was coming through the hoarfrost and sparkling down on the swans, creating this magical scene.

And then I had my camera with me.

I was taking photographs.

And then right in the middle of this scene, one of the swans rises up, spreads its wings like an angel, and then sits back down again.

And it was just the most angelic, magic, beautiful scene I could've ever imagined.

And what was special about that is that I realized that here was a scene that had been missing from Minnesota for over 100 years.

People didn't know what they were missing.

And so I think there's a point at which you kind of leave the biology and the science behind, and then you start to appreciate the real magic of what that bird brings to us.

Matteson: So we were in line after Minnesota to collect eggs from Alaska.

We collected 385 eggs, and of those 356, hatched out 93%.

The signets then went into two main programs, decoy rearing, and then captive rearing.

So with decoy rearing, we had University of Wisconsin interns in float tubes that led these swans that had been conditioned earlier, before they left the zoo, to follow a decoy pulley.

Abel: The critical part with imprinting is this movement part, the birds bond to whatever it is.

We immediately started running the decoy back and forth.

We had it attached to a pulley system.

We would pull a pulley back and forth, and it would play this following call, and the signets would run along after it.

And we did this for the first three to five days after they hatch to make sure that the bonding had taken place, and then we whisk them off to the wetlands and raise them as we did.

We were in floating blinds, which were made up of a fisherman's float tube, camouflage, over the top of it came a blind, and then I would be wearing chest waders.

Then each day, I would float up to the cage, pull the decoy out of the cage, and the birds would all follow along behind, and I would take them to good feeding areas and they would eat, and then we would take them over to a safe loaf site, usually a wide open, flat, dry area, put the decoy up on land, and the signets would all climb up behind it and preen for an hour to go to sleep.

And then when they woke up, we'd go pull it back in and do the whole thing over again.

Matteson: We didn't have any history with swans migrating.

We weren't sure if they were going to migrate and where they would go.

The reason we went to Alaska was that here was a migratory flock that genetically was programmed to fly south.

So we're hoping that the genes would kick in and the birds would migrate south, but we weren't absolutely sure.

Well, that first year, the birds migrated to a site 15 miles north of Dallas, Texas, so that answered that question.

We had a recovery goal of 20 breeding and migratory pairs.

Today, we have around 13,000 trumpet swans in the wild in Wisconsin.

You know, our efforts and all of our partners -- we brought them back.

We have swans where we had none.

And when I can point out those big white birds on that marsh to my grandson and tell him that I helped bring those things back to Wisconsin, that's pretty gratifying.

It's very gratifying.

Lumsden: We should be doing what we can to look after endangered and threatened species and to restore those we have lost.

In Ontario, we've restored the wild turkey and the peregrine falcon, which we had lost.

And of course, the trumpeter.

That's the other side of the endangered species coin.

Endangered species, you try to save what you've got, and here, we're trying to bring back what we've lost.

So, we got eggs from Alaska.

Michigan had a quota of 50 eggs they were supposed to collect that year, but the governor cut off their funds.

The state had funding troubles, and he cut off their money.

So Joe Johnson, God bless him, in the States, phoned me and said, "Look, we can't get our quota this year."

So they stretched a lot of points in Alaska and the Fish and Wildlife Service, gave me permits to go and get them that year.

♪♪ Johnson: Always cover the eggs, so ravens don't get them, eh?

Four eggs, three good, two left, one taken.

As soon as we get back to Michigan, we come out here to the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary and immediately place those eggs in an incubator and let them rest for 24 hours, sort of stabilize after the transport period.

92 eggs we've brought back from Alaska.

92 had living embryos in them when we did listen to them.

[ Squawking ] As they hatch, we put them in pedigree trays and keep track of all brothers and sisters and mark them so we know precisely who came from what nest.

And then raise them in broods that are two or three nests combined, who will all believe they are brothers and sisters.

The young swans have not developed their voice, and we jokingly say it's like a middle school band or an elementary school band trumpet player.

[ Discordant squawk ] Very hoarse, very coarse.

And then when they're a year old, they're a little bit better high school band, and then of course, the adults, you have heard, and they sound as good as a professional band.

It's called unison calling.

As in the Sandhill Crane, they have a unison call, and it's something that pairs, bonded pairs do.

Narrator: In 1991, the first swans from the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary were released at the Seney National Wildlife Refuge in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

I started out as a biologist at Seney in 2005, and I was there till 2009.

And very much like Red Rock Lakes, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is really kind of isolated from the lower 48, and its remoteness made it very easy for the swans to habituate when they reintroduced them back in '91.

And there was plenty of aquatic vegetation.

The food was there, the habitat was there, all the impoundments really made it ideal for swans to breed up there.

Narrator: It is mid-April at Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

A female trumpeter swan has just begun to sit on her nest.

She and her mate have returned to this marsh every year to live and raise a family.

[ Wind whistles ] She will lay between 3 and 8 eggs, laying one egg every other day until the clutch is complete.

The male, called a cob, stays close to the nes while fiercely defending the pair's nesting territory, often driving off other swans or intruders on the marsh, like Canada geese.

The female, called a pen, has an unlikely visit from a red-winged blackbird.

She is very tolerant of her neighbor.

The male, not so much.

After 10 days, she has finished laying her eggs.

Now that the clutch is complete, she will begin incubating them for the next 32 to 37 days.

The waiting begins.

Olson: National wildlife refuges play a very important role in the restoration and the continuation of a lot of species in North America, trumpeter swans included.

With refuges, they are also networked with other refuges.

So when you have refuge managers talking to each other and working with each other, you actually have a huge impact on habitat preservation, habitat availability for all migratory birds, including swans.

And because you have all this preservation, all the federal land protection, and then working with the state partners, refuges have done an excellent job of restoring a lot of species in North America.

Is that a pretty big wingspan?

It's close to 8 feet here.

How about, somebody want to help stretch the other side?

-Yeah.

-How about you?

I believe that environmental education is extremely important in the impact that it can make.

So it's great to see the excitement in these young kids coming out for a swan, to see a big swan and come out and enjoy the environment here in the park and the settings and the beautiful weather out today.

The memories are so tremendous, I couldn't even list list them all.

The combination of the public, both the consumers of the resource, hunters and trappers, and the non-consumers, the bird watchers, people love to see wildlife.

That's really what hit it for me.

And a chance to bring those folks together and to concentrate on the habitat that's so critically important for the swans to live in.

You know, we've only got 2% or less of the original 2.5 million acres of wetlands out there.

So we got to capitalize on trying to save what we got and restoring new wetlands as we go, for swans and that myriad of some 400-plus species, plants, and animals that use wetlands during some part of their life cycle.

I can't really express my appreciation fully on the general public that come forth today with the teachers with their students, the public that we have helping us out with swan restoration, with other types of activities and conservation.

It makes the whole world seem very, very wonderful to me.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It's really quite special to me to hear a grandmother saying, "Why do we want to have swans in Iowa?"

and her response is, "Well, I'm afraid of my kids, my grandkids, moving out of state.

I'm really fearful of that, but I really hope by improving our quality of life or water quality or environment, that my kids and my grandkids might stick in the state."

So I really appreciate that connection with people and getting them engaged, and their passions to do good things.

And what's really rewarding is when people have gone out, restored wetlands and actually put water on the landscape, and actually the swans have then returned.

It's really quite rewarding to see that come full circle.

So we built this four-acre pond, kind of to serve as a water supply for the cows, and they had this swan project.

I just called Ron once or twice and just asked him questions, and lo and behold, he was kind of interested, too.

So I think it was 2002, they brought me a pair of flightless swans.

And ever since then, we've kind of raised baby signets for him every year, and I think we've raised close to 50 of them.

And the DNR kind of takes them and relocates them.

Just watching how fast the babies grow from little fuzzballs to nearly full grown by fall and just everything that goes along with it.

Harms: Just earlier today, we captured a young trumpeter swan at a location here in Iowa.

We capture these birds to obviously get them in the hand so that we can place these GPS collars on them, and so we can obtain the data every day, and the data being the locations of the birds every day.

They're pushed to a website via a cellphone tower.

We take the data and put it onto the public website in the form of maps so that people can see where the birds are moving.

So the entire process for capturing and putting the collars on the bird takes about 15 minutes.

That's really important.

We want to try to work efficiently and work quickly, because the most important thing is that we keep the bird safe and we keep ourselves safe.

So we move quickly.

We do this quickly, we release the bird, and the only difference is it has a nice new necklace to wear around for the next few years.

DNR Agent: What we have here is a trumpeter swan that's struck a power line.

It actually has a broken wing.

Power lines, unfortunately, one of the major cause of mortality for trumpeter swans.

Swans typically fly low, especially to the youngsters as they learn to fly.

And if you imagine a swan flying 50 mile an hour, they can see the lines, but they oftentimes veer up or down and catch the power line that they didn't see.

May be able to see up here some of the spirals, some of the visual aids that might help the trumpeter swans to see the lines, and those actually do help to reduce some of the power line collisions.

Trumpeter swans pick up lead, thinking it's grit, and it's actually ground up into their gizzard.

In state parks, lead has been banned since the 1920s, as a refuge, but still trumpeter swans and other wildlife actually pick up and actually die from lead pellets, amazingly deposited close to 100 years ago.

So every swan that comes in with suspected lead or really any swan that comes in, is going to get what we call a lead plop radiograph, and that's to look for metal in their GI system.

So this is one of the swans that we just re-checked, and I'll kind of zoom in a little bit here.

But this is the stomach of the swan right here, and all these really bright white pieces are metal.

We can't say for sure that it's lead, just looking at the radiograph, but we know that it's metal, and if he has a lead level in a blood system, then our best guess is that it is lead.

But we can certainly do further testing on it once we get it out of his system to make sure that it was indeed lead.

But he's got a lead level.

He's acting clinical.

We see metal in the GI.

We're assuming that it's lead.

You know, one of the main reasons that I'm so passionate about wildlife medicine is because I feel like a lot of times the wildlife that are brought to us are injured or ill because of humans -- with lead toxicity, especially, we've caused that problem by using lead ammunition, by using lead fishing tackle.

It's such a great and rewarding feeling for me to be able to help to bring an animal back to healthy population.

I really do feel like I'm making a difference with every individual that I treat, and being able to release them back out to the wild is the greatest feeling.

I mean, you really can't put a price tag on it.

A lot of zoos have what we call SSPs or species survival programs, and those help different species that we feel are in need to sustain their population in captivity and to help out with different programs for reintroduction.

And that's exactly what we do with trumpeter swans.

So I'm here with our trumpeter swan eggs, so we just collected them from the nest.

And the reason why we do that is because we want to ensure the optimum survival and safety for these signets.

We look for the air cell, make sure it's developing well, and I'm seeing all kinds of movement.

That's what I want to see.

I want to see that little embryo bouncing around in there, because that's a sign it's nice and healthy.

So this is perfect.

This is exactly what we want to see.

What zoos do is, if they have a breeding pair of trumpeter swans, they'll let them lay eggs and hatch out, and zoos will have to be able to raise those signets for four to six months.

So usually they'll hatch in May or June, and then zoos will raise them till between September and November, and that's when they will be sent to a reintroduction program.

So during that time, it's kind of nice, because guests then can watch the signets grow up and be part of their story.

And for them to come to the zoo and be able to see them so close and feel a connection, and for me to be able to tell that story to them, and for them to go home and possibly see a trumpeter swan in the wild in Ohio, that's the best feeling.

Honestly, it really is.

That's what zoos are all about.

We want to inspire people to help wildlife.

We recently partnered with the Iowa DNR to be part of their restoration program.

Five zoos participated in the program.

And what was really great is we all met there.

We all were so supportive of the program that from everywhere, from Maryland, from Kansas City, from Cleveland, from Iowa.

We all met together.

And we're able to release our own swans.

And that was an absolutely amazing experience, to be able to raise these animals to teach people about their story, and then to show our visitors that we are participating in releasing them into the wild and helping out this species.

So it was a very gratifying experience for all of the zoos involved.

One!

Two, three!

[ Children laughing, clapping ] Mayo: We get to take care of animals.

We get to inspire people.

We get to motivate people to take action.

I've loved every part about being a zookeeper, but in the last couple of years getting into birds and then getting into the trumpeter swan program, it really solidified why we do what we do here.

It makes me so proud to be part of this program to actually see a species that, because of us, almost went extinct, and then to see, again, people be able to turn that around.

That's kind of an amazing process to go through, and you really feel like you're making a difference.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: It is now mid-May at Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

At the marsh, the male stands guard on the nest while the female takes a break to preen and feed.

After 32 straight days, the first signet hatches.

♪♪ The female quickly returns to the nest.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The next morning, three signets now appear, later followed by a fourth.

Life can be challenging for a one-day-old signet on top of a three-foot-high nest.

♪♪ ♪♪ By late afternoon, a fifth and final signet is hatched, and Mom needs a break.

The male guards and closely watches over his five young signets until her return.

After a short respite, she returns to the nest.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ In the morning, the signets have made it down to the water for the first time.

The parents stir up water insects and crustaceans for the signets' first meal.

Then, with caution, they venture out onto the marsh for the first time as a family.

♪♪ ♪♪ The parents rock back and forth, using their feet to stir up sediment and bring plants to the surface for the young signets to eat.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, I think the restoration of the trumpeter swan is one of the major success stories of the last century.

There are two big surprises that occurred.

One, the trumpeter swan was able to become habituated to a suburban or even urban environment much more readily than people had expected.

I think the second thing was just how successful the program has been.

Through the restoration efforts, we've now built an interior population of trumpeter swans in the upper Midwest and now into Southern Canada that far exceeds the population anywhere else.

And I think it just goes to show that this was the prime habitat.

The swans have done remarkably well here, and I would have to say they've really far exceeded the expectations of anybody involved in the restoration program.

Narrator: While the restoration efforts in the Midwest have had great success with well over 40,000 swans in the interior population today, the story of the Rocky Mountain population is far different.

Despite the decades of restoration and management efforts, there are less than 800 trumpeter swans in the greater Yellowstone region today, and critically low numbers in the small restoration flocks, like here at Summer Lake in Oregon.

[ Hisses ] What really hurt this population down in the states in the Intermountain West, historically, is they lost their traditional wintering sites because of over-hunting and wiped out all the birds that pioneered those routes.

And I call it flock memory -- that flock memory was lost.

These birds will help gain that back.

They can teach the rest of the birds in the flock where to go, where it's good.

So the big issue in this Intermountain West country is that you have these little, scattered populations and flocks, because it's the isolation that is really hurting these birds.

If there's some big crisis in a local area, there's no other birds to come back and fill in the gaps that they leave behind.

So they're not connected very well.

We're hoping that these Oregon birds in their wanderings will help connect these other flocks with birds in Oregon and become more of a population that is connected and can learn the landscape better and can survive for the future.

I would say one of the most major threats for swans in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem is probably human encroachment.

More people are moving to the Rocky Mountains.

More people are moving to Idaho and Wyoming.

Because of that, you have more construction going on, you have the lowering of water tables.

So you have more people moving into the area, and I can't blame them.

It's a beautiful area.

And the other thing we're dealing with is, you know, a changing climate, you know, droughts are becoming longer.

Snow events are becoming more intense and severe.

And I think those two issues, both the change in climate as well as human encroachment, are affecting all populations, including swans.

Narrator: Despite the challenges, restoration efforts continue, offering trumpeter swans in the Rocky Mountain population a measure of hope.

We began to work with Wyoming Wetlands Society and then later, Montana Waterfowl Federation to reintroduce captive bred birds, and we've been doing that ever since and have established a good, viable population, not only here in the reservation, but farther to the north, up towards British Columbia and possibly even in British Columbia.

[ Honking ] I saw a great opportunity to return this missing ecological piece of the puzzle.

And even though it's had its ups and downs and some frustration and some heartaches along the way, it's rewarding to see it succeed and to see the success potential there for the long term.

[ Honking ] We had a new pair find its way to Swan Lake this year.

It's kind of odd, named Swan Lake, and it had no swans.

And the last time Swans nested there was 1966.

I'm born 1960.

So this really was a landmark event.

All Yellowstone employees were really excited.

It's right next to the road, so this was exciting for visitors.

But to have swans return on their own to Swan Lake was a momentous event.

You had the Ranger division protecting it from people.

You had people watching it.

We're gathering data on it.

It was very exciting.

They always say, swans teach you patience.

We've been releasing swans in Yellowstone since 2012, and this was one of our first signs that those releases were going to take root.

The U.S. National Park Service is about preserving and taking care of natural systems.

But trumpeter swans are iconic, and the world is under threat of so many different things that parks are a last stronghold.

And in some of our legislation, creating vignettes of primitive America, well, swans are part of that vignette, and to lose swans from Yellowstone, the public didn't want it.

And further, we just don't know why they were declining.

Given that indecision, they're too magnificent of an animal to let it go.

They've got ecosystem implications.

They give people pleasure.

That's another one of our missions, visitor enjoyment.

We just had to do something, and it's starting to bear fruit, and we couldn't be more excited.

[ Honking ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: In early June, the family has suffered the loss of two signets.

The small signets are especially vulnerable to predators such as eagles, coyotes, and snapping turtles.

For the three signets still remaining, they will grow rapidly during their first summer.

♪♪ It is now mid-June, and the family has lost yet another signet.

In late June, the six-week-old signets are still covered with mostly down and have started to grow some of their juvenile feathers, including their flight feathers.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It is late summer on the marsh and only one signet remains.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Finally, in mid-September, the signet has reached an age when signets fledge, and it is ready to fly.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ For me, I think one of the things that's most gratifying is learning about the stories of the people who have made things happen.

You can talk about agencies and governments doing stuff, but it's really the individuals that are making things happen, and it's the power of their passion and commitment that have helped restore trumpeter swans.

So that's been gratifying, because it's reinforced the importance and inspiration that comes from, you know, hearing and seeing that story being lived out.

Trumpeter swans have given me a sense of real inspiration that when you care about wildlife, you can find ways to make a difference.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: Mollie Beattie, the former director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, once said, "What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself."

Because of the dedication and efforts of so many, the trumpeter swan, once near the brink of extinction, has returned.

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