The sound of Whooper Swans - add your voice to protect Lough Beg's wetland landscape

Lough Beg offers a winter homeplace to Whooper Swans visiting from Iceland. This very moment local farmers watch flocks of hundreds grazing in fields which the Northern Ireland government is dead-set to put under tarmac in a matter of weeks. Lough Beg is part of the River Bann migration fly-way and in April flocks of more swans will be passing through, stopping to rest and feed on these very same fields on their migration North. Adjacent to the fields to be buried under the footprint of a dual carriageway with its associated new junctions and illuminated roundabouts are peaceful open water areas, used day and night by these wild swans for roosting and loafing. Please share this soundscape evoked by a small flock calling in flight and joining other Whooper Swans resting on water. After some greetings and debate, things settle. Recorded by Matt Rellmar, source: https://www.xeno-canto.org "...... Once, the wild swans were sacred. Now, they're a protected species that keeps coming back to drift on the still waters, faithful to the ways of our ancestors, as faithless to ours, we keep changing their landing place. After the draining, the tilling, the bypass-building that cost 18 hectares of habitat comes the red-routed A6 to mock their site-fidelity and steal more territory - it's just a slower form of killing...." Extract from 'Landing Place', by Mary Montague