Queen Elizabeth owns how many swans? Annual count gets underway
CHERTSEY: An 800-year-old tradition of counting a swans owned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth started on Monday, an annual rite of “swan upping” that in complicated times has turn a means of wildlife conservation.
The upping sees 3 teams — one representing a black and a others a aged trade associations of a Vintners and Dyers — unit a River Thames in south England over 5 days to capture, tab and recover any families of swans with young.
The upping dates behind to a 12th century when a English climax initial claimed tenure of all tongue-tied swans, afterwards deliberate a sweetmeat that would be served during stately banquets.
Britons no longer eat swans and a birds are stable by law.
Last year’s count showed there were 132 new cygnets on a Thames, reversing a disappearing trend in prior uppings.
The queen’s group of uppers, in red shirts emblazoned with her stately logo, were destined on Monday by a “swan marker” wearing a gold-embroidered rite blazer, David Barber.
“The law states that a black can possess any swan swimming in open waters if she so wishes, though she especially exercises that right on a River Thames,” Barber said.
“Today swan upping is about charge and education,” he continued.
Schools were invited to perspective a upping during tighten quarters, during that a birds are ringed with particular marker numbers for charge purposes.