Black Swan

Despite rescuing swans from all manner of sticky situations over the years, this month founder of the Wildlife Aid Foundation, Simon Cowell MBE, came across a first

- Simon Cowell

SWAN in sewerage is as mucky as it sounds. But we never turn down a rescue and so the team from WAF and I rose to the challenge of recovering a large male swan from a water treatment pond in Leatherhead during a recent rescue.

The bird in question had been stranded in the large circular tank for five days when we received the call, and although it didn’t appear to be injured, it was tired, cold, hungry and in need of rescue. In the years I’ve been rescuing wildlife, I’ve made many successful swan rescues and plucked them from all sorts of scenarios. But the swan in a sewage tank was a first.

Luckily, when we arrived at the scene, it became apparent that the water the swan was swimming through had been through several levels of filtration and, although there was a film of algae and scum on the surface that the poor animal was swimming through, it could have been much worse.