Swans occasionally become hostile toward nearby humans and will pursue them, nipping with their beak and flapping their wings; YouTube is well-stocked with amateur videos of people running and screaming from just such attacks.
How much damage can a swan really do? Seems to me it should be possible to grab the offending bird by the neck and then do pretty much whatever you want with it (granted, you may be subject to legal penalties if you injure or kill the bird).
A friend has claimed that swans can break your bones with hits from their wings, but I’m dubious. These birds are evolved for flight, so wing bones are likely to be hollow and thin-walled to keep the weight down, which would mean they’re fragile; I suspect all the wing flapping is either for locomation (to keep up with the fleeing victim), or for display purposes.
What’s the straight dope? Are the people in the YouTube videos right to run away screaming in panic? Are there definite cases where a swan has broken a person’s bones by striking them with their wing?
Yes, you can just grab them by the neck and give them a little swing and it will break their neck, like cracking a whip. Their wings flapping around can be a little disconcerting but barring a freak eye accident or something, not physically damaging in the least.
Yes, swans are both territorial and powerful. Anthony Hensley’s death was attributed to a swan attack. I can’t find the link, but heard a report on NPR years ago about an upscale lake community unhappy about noisy jet skiers. Resident swans, even angrier about the intrusion frequently attacked the jet skiers to the cheers of onlookers. (Ninja’d while struggling to hyperlink on my phone grrr)
The same article reports an ornithologist who says that swans are not strong enough to break bones, but I can attest that the birds can be intimidating enough to give you a good scare on the water. I did some college rowing at Cambridge and often encountered Mr Asbo, a famously aggressive male swan. Mr Asbo has been known to attack rowers and has capsized people in sculls.
It is somewhat comical to be menaced by a big, fluffed-up white bird, let me tell you it’s a different feeling when you have your feet strapped into a boat, both hands occupied on an oar, and are effectively sitting at eye level to a fast approaching, enraged swan!
We got geese around here, and the swans are more aggressive than the geese. If you want to keep geese off a pond, you can get swans.
I’ve seen a few geese attacks over the years…they aren’t really very deadly. Highly unlikely a goose or a swan can break your bones from a direct blow.
They can do things like run you off the bike path, but the injury is basically from the bike fall.
They can peck an eye out. And I’ve put about a dozen stitches in one poor fellow’s scalp who was running on a forest path and got pecked by a goose.
But one on one neither a goose nor a swan could actually do real damage to a capable adult, other than secondary injuries like making you drown if you panic…