A plan to establish a permanent hunting season for trumpeter swans in several Western states is in trouble because of worries that expanding the species' breeding range will be difficult.
Biologists from state wildlife agencies, the Trumpeter Swan Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed last week to try to transplant the rare swans to Utah as a way to broaden its range.
The plan envisions using the Bear River National Wildlife Refuge northwest of Ogden as a new trumpeter breeding area.
There are between 300 and 500 breeding trumpeter swans in the Greater Yellowstone area where Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet.
Those birds are joined each winter by more than 2,500 trumpeters from Canada. Biologists worry that the available habitat cannot support that many birds and are using relocation programs to move the birds into other areas, including Utah.
Critics say using the Bear River refuge is problematic because the state's tundra swan hunt is in the same area. Tundra and trumpeter swans are difficult to distinguish in flight. Some groups, including the Fund for Animals, would like to shut down all swan hunting.
A limited trumpeter swan hunt has been allowed for the past five years, but that experimental program expired this year.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued an environmental study that would extend the hunt. Public hearings on that analysis are scheduled May 15 in Idaho Falls and May 16 in Salt Lake City.
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources waterfowl program head Tom Aldrich is among the skeptics who do not think Bear River has the habitat to support trumpeter swans.
"We value our swan hunt program equally with the trumpeter swan expansion," he said. "The trumpeter swan experiment should not always take precedence over tundra swan hunting."
Aldrich's position is supported by Norm Saake of the Nevada Division of Wildlife, another state where tundras are hunted. The fact that some environmental groups say the Rocky Mountain trumpeter swan population could be listed as endangered concerned Utah Division of Wildlife Resources director John Kimball.
He said Utah would not be comfortable bringing in an endangered species without local and state approval. Ruth Shea, executive director of the Trumpeter Swan Society, said that while goals to expand trumpeters' winter range and breeding areas are good, the states and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lack a coherent plan to accomplish those goals.
Shea said that hunting on Bear River is not the issue. The problem is that state biologists and Fish and Wildlife have no good management package in place to get the birds to move into other areas.
Jasper Carlton, head of the Colorado-based Biodiversity Legal Foundation, said the United States is the only country in the world that allows swan hunts.
"We have been working on the trumpeter for 10 years," he said. "Frankly, I am surprised the trumpeter swan is not already (endangered). When you have a waterfowl species whose U.S. breeding population is only a few hundred birds, can that sustain a recreational hunt?"
On the Net: The Trumpeter Swan Society site: www.taiga.net/swans/index.html.
Fish and Wildlife Service site: www.fws.gov/.