Whooper Swan (Cygnus cygnus)
About the Whooper Swan
The whooper swan (/ˈhuːpə(ɹ) swɒn/ "hooper swan"; Cygnus cygnus), is a large northern hemisphere swan. It is the Eurasian counterpart of the North American trumpeter swan. Francis Willughby and John Ray's Ornithology of 1676 referred to this swan as "the Elk, Hooper, or wild Swan". It was one of the many bird species originally described by Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, where it was given the binomial name of Anas cygnus. The species name is from cygnus, the Latin for "swan", and the type species for the genus Cygnus. This swan is monotypic with no subspecies. The old name 'elk', which is not related to the deer species of the same name, derives from Old Norse elft, and also survives in modern Icelandic name for the species álft; it is cognate with the Latin albus, 'white'.
A real field recording of the Whooper Swan. Press play and focus on the rhythm and pitch of each phrase.
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Our streaming copies are mirrored from the original xeno-canto file and transcoded to 96 kbps mono — a modification, so we note it here; the licence for each recording is named in its credit below.
1 recording on this page · licensed CC BY-SA ×1 · mirrored on this server, free for commercial reuse · recorded in Austria, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany and elsewhere · xeno-canto lists 1,111 recordings for this species in total.
Similar species
- Black SwanCygnus atratusrecording
- Black-necked SwanCygnus melancoryphusprofile
- Mute SwanCygnus olorrecording
- Trumpeter SwanCygnus buccinatorrecording
- Tundra SwanCygnus columbianusrecording
Species grouped by shared genus, family and range.