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Susan Patla
Ausan Patla is a “red shirt,” the nickname for Wyoming Game and Fish Department employees recognizable by that signature piece of their uniform. In an agency typically focused on critters that can be hunted or fished, this slender, soft-spoken woman occupies a different niche. As a non-game biologist, she keeps an eye out for the species in peril, such as lynx and the recently recovered bald eagle. One of her most magnificent charges, the trumpeter swan, still captivates her—even after she has spent more than a decade working to give North America’s largest waterfowl a more secure future in western Wyoming.
Q. What put the swan population at risk?
A. Around the 1900s, most people thought trumpeter swans were going to be extinct. There were about sixty-nine swans that stayed year-round in Yellowstone and Red Rock Lakes [roughly thirty miles west of Yellowstone in Montana] and another seventy that nested in interior Canada and wintered down here. All the other swans were killed off, mostly by market hunting for skins and feathers. Swan quills were considered the top writing instrument of the time.
Q. How are the swans doing now?
A. Swans that live here year-round are part of the tri-state flock that overlaps Idaho and Montana in the Greater Yellowstone area. Last year, we counted 379 adult swans in the tri-state area, with over a third of those in Wyoming. Even though we see hundreds of swans in the winter, many are migrating from Canada. Our resident [nesting] population hovers at around a hundred adults; that’s why we monitor and manage the birds, to make sure we don’t lose that resident population. Swans are traditionalists. They learn from their parents. It’s only the swans born here that stay here.
Q. What work have you, and Game and Fish, done to restore the resident population?
A. Prior to the early 2000s, all the swans nested in the Snake River drainage. Because distribution was so limited, we started to put out captive-raised birds provided by the Wyoming Wetlands Society. Ten years later, we actually had thirteen pairs that nested in the Green River Basin. The importance of our program is that we have doubled productivity. So this provides us with a cushion of security for the future. This wasn’t an expensive project. We didn’t put out a lot of swans, but we were persistent and that has really paid off.
