Residents Search For Missing Prospect Park Swans

PARK SLOPE, NY — Residents fear something might be a-fowl in Prospect Park after seven swans went missing this month, but the city said they simply flew away, the New York Daily News reported.

A group of concerned citizens recently put up fliers around the park desperately seeking answers about the fate of seven swans who took residence on the banks of a lake inside when they went missing earlier this month.

"One theory is that they may have been poached or taken," Whitney Williams, who helped put up 50 fliers around the park, wrote in an email to Patch.

"We are devastated that the swans are likely gone for reasons that are unnatural and we want to find out the truth. If we believed that they left on their own accord or died from natural causes, we wouldn't be working so hard to find out the truth."

Williams wrote that her and a group of friends starting putting up the fliers on Friday after they stopped seeing the swans inside the park earlier this month, worried that a horrible fate came upon them.

"We can't be silent when we know it's more likely that humans had something to do with their disappearance," she wrote. "I sincerely hope we're wrong. I want them to be ok."

However, both the state's Department of Environmental Conservation and the city's Parks Department told the paper they don't think a horrible fate came upon the swans, just that they simply decamped to a new location.

"We have no reason to suspect that the swans have been removed from the park," the Parks Department told the paper. "Flying to and from a lake is normal behavior for wild birds."

However, Williams said the fowls, who were last spotted on June 1, grew up in the park and find it suspect they all flew the coop at the same time.

"It IS a possibility that they flew away, but it's very unlikely," Williams wrote in an email. "They know that food is available here 365 days a year and stay even when the lake freezes over.

My feeling is that the state agencies, such as the DEC, view mute swans as pests because they are a non-native species, so they're not really putting much care or effort into investigating all the possibilities for their disappearance," she added.

Image courtesy of Angelica Hamann.