Whooper swan
The whooper swan (/ˈhuːpə(ɹ) swɒn/ "hooper swan"; Cygnus cygnus), also known as the common swan, is a large northern hemisphere swan. It is the Eurasian counterpart of the North American trumpeter swan, and the type species for the genus Cygnus.
Taxonomy[edit]
Francis Willughby and John Ray's Ornithology of 1676 referred to this swan as "the Elk, Hooper, or wild Swan".[2]: 23 It was one of the many bird species originally described by Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, where it was given the binomial name of Anas cygnus.[3] The species name is from cygnus, the Latin for "swan".[4]
Whooper swans are much admired in Europe.[8] The whooper swan has been the national bird of Finland since 1981[11][12] and is featured on the Finnish 1 euro coin. The whooper swan is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies. Musical utterances by whooper swans at the moment of death have been suggested as the origin of the swan song legend. The global spread of H5N1 reached the UK in April 2006 in the form of a dead whooper swan found in Scotland.[13]