Utah's swan hunt is a testament to hunting working with conservation. Hunting areas are limited and tightly controlled and monitored by the fish and game dept. This year the swan numbers were high enough to allow extra permits and open additional hunting areas-but still all in the salt lake marshes/vicinity. Most years if 10 trumpeter swans are bagged the dwr shuts the hunt down. This year they increased that to 20 and last I heard there were 16 reported. All swans harvested must be measured by the dwr. Trumpeters do migrate through and I think many of the birds killed are young and grey, thus harder to tell the difference.
The weather this year was unusually warm and sunny and the marsh-good call on unit 2 was overgrown with less water than usual. Unit 2 lies between a non hunted rest area and a private duck club, so the swans pass over and being naive to the ways of hunters, are often very low. After they have seen some hunting pressure they tend to stay over the protected areas and fly much higher.
Bear River Bird Refuge is a federal refuge area and hosts a 12 mile loop for hunting access and visitor viewing. Again heavily restricted and patrolled-its a good place to mind your P's and Q's. The dike I like to hunt used to restrict hunters to only 10 shells per day, trying to eliminate the "skybusters." This year they opened it up to 25 shells which I appreciated. I did shoot a mallard drake and passed some shovelors the morning I killed my swan. I like to use decoys and I have a DJ's swan call that is awesome. I was using neither tactic when I killed my swan, just sort of standing there in the wind talking to another guy and staring through the binos-I'll post the story soon, hard to find time and pix just now.
The meat is very dependant on what they have been eating, I usually make all my ducks, geese and swan into jerky at season's end-the jerky is always good. I used to have some good taxidermy friends and a couple biologists from Idaho area, they would all recognize unit 2, I've drawn alot of maps for guys that wanted to collect this fun trophy. I mount my own and have a plan for this one-it was a very, very good bird.