Monday, June 18, 2012

Attack of the killer swan

Nate and I went out kayaking at my friend Brad's cottage in Pickney, off Gallagher Lake. As we kayaked over to the channel, we saw this swan flying over from all the way across the lake, over to about 50 feet from where were at. I started telling Nate how mean swans could be, and how you never wanted to mess with them, because the strength of their wings could brake a man's arm. Nate's next question was, 'Dad, why are we trying to intercept him?' The thing is, we weren't - but the swan was. We were paddling towards the channel, and he was on a line to meet us about 50 feet ahead. The swan got to a point about 10 feet ahead of us, and continued paddling diagonally, and I swear it looked like he was doing it so he could always keep one of his eyes (located on the sides of his head) on us at all times. We joked about how the swan was trying to follow us in reverse. He kept turning around and honking at us, but we figured it was because we were too close. We slowed down, and so did he. We would go to pass him on one side of the channel, and he would move to that side to prevent us from passing him. He did this each time we' would try and pass him. Odd. We decided to turn around, because the swan was freaking us out a bit. As we did, the swan flew at us, flying around our boat, hitting the kayak with his wings. This completely freaked us out. The bird was huge, with he neck alone being as thick as my leg. For the next 15 minutes, he continued to dive-bomb us. I would try and smack him with my paddle (without hurting him), just to keep him from getting too close. He hit our boat a few times, but never hit Nate and I. We had no idea what we'd done to tick him off, but he hated us. We kept kayaking back towards Brad's cottage and he kept following us, from the front, and occasionally flying at us. When we got within 50 feet of Brad's dock, he left us alone. We decided that no one would believe it without video, so we grabbed my phone, and came back out to get some video of the crazy swan Apparently we're not the first person.... This guy was killed recently after a swan attack.