Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky did not, after all, write Duck Pond. The whooper swan, like its onomatopoeic cousins, the whistling and the trumpeter, belongs to an elegant society of sisters; the mute ...

It’s thought to derive from the sound a Whooper swan might make as it gasps for breath – a descending tone of eerie beauty. The royal connection with swans goes back centuries. Even today the ...