WIRES South Coast volunteer Zora Brown cared for the cygnets for four months, and released them into a waterway with an existing population of swans on Saturday, September 1. 

“We went camping at the release site so we could be there with them and settle them in,” Mrs Brown said. 

“There were more than 150 swans in there. I didn’t want to release them where there were just a couple of dominant pairs because they can be aggressive. As soon as I took them down, they were straight into the green, eating their natural food. You could tell they were ready for it and absolutely loved it.” 

The pair were saved after their mother took them, and two other siblings, into the ocean at just three days old. People walking on the beach saved them, but couldn’t catch the third sibling, and the fourth was mauled by a dog. 

Mrs Brown said the third cygnet was found a day later, but was covered in ticks and did not survive. 

“When two of them got washed up, two people on the beach collected them and called WIRES. They were stressed out, but I became their mum,” she said. 

Keeping up with the pair’s eating habits was a challenge, Mrs Brown said, but they self-fed from the beginning and grew from just 125 grams to 5 kilograms.

“They were foraging for their own food at a young age,” she said. 

“At the beginning, I was feeding them finely chopped up lettuce. They grew at a rapid rate – by the end, I would get a massive box of lettuce, and a garbage bag of lettuce, and that would last just three days. It was phenomenal.” 

Although they were fed fresh produce in care, it was impossible to replicate the diet they would get in the wild, Mrs Brown said. 

“I am confident they have the food they need,” she said. 

“You can never 100 per cent replicate what they get in the wild. We try our best, but you just can’t go dredging lakes daily to feed them. Ultimately, the best thing is for them to be out there.”

Watching them fly for the first time was “awesome”, Mrs Brown said. 

“They need 40 metres of running on water before they can fly,” she said. “Their enclosure was 15 metres long ... with a pond, and they were flapping like crazy and getting restless. Watching them fly was awesome. We saw it right in front of us, and each time they got better."