Ugly-duckling swans at Fish Springs

Families packed the San Juan High School auditorium, ranging all the way from babies to grandparents.
A cacophony of sounds rose as friends chatted, babies cried, and young ones ran up and down the aisles until their parents corralled them. The lights blinked, dimmed, and a spotlight focused on the play’s greeter. A hush fell as we all settled into our seats.
With many of our young friends in the cast, we were eager to watch Blanding Elementary School’s production of Honk! a musical based on Hans Christian Anderson’s classic tale, “The Ugly Duckling.”
The first scene opens with father duck, Drake, and mother duck, Ida, waiting for their clutch of eggs to hatch. Four of the eggs are perfectly sized, oval, and blue, but the fifth is ginormous and brown.
When the eggs finally hatch, four darling ducklings emerge, but the fifth, Ugly, enters the world with a huge and awkward body. Instead of quacking, he communicates with loud, nerve-wracking honks.
Ida, like all mothers, falls head-over-heels in love with her son, but his siblings mock him unmercifully. Feeling like an outcast, he becomes susceptible to Cat—played by one of our beloved friends, disguised with ears, whiskers, tail and a truly evil demeanor—who lures him home for “dinner.”
Ugly escapes, but in the process becomes hopelessly lost. Thus, begins his adventures as he tries to return home to his mother. During the winter, all alone, he nearly froze to death. However, because he’d grown through his trials, he transforms into a stunningly beautiful bird.
Sitting in the auditorium next to Ted and watching the talented performers sing, dance, and, yes, honk, I couldn’t help thinking about the real-life whistling swans we’d seen a few weeks earlier at Fish Springs, a National Wildlife Refuge, 75 miles northwest of Delta, UT.
Fish Springs is a large, improbable oasis in the southern part of the great Salt Lake Desert. The water was deep blue, the grasses golden, and the surrounding mountains still had snow on their peaks. The sky, with a few wispy clouds, matched the color of the water. Hundreds, if not thousands, of waterfowl floated on the warm, salty water or dotted the airways.
Encompassing 17,922 acres, Fish Springs, named for the Utah chubs that fill its waters, contains 10,000 acres of wetland, fed by eight natural springs, pumped from an underlying fault line.
Wildlife thrives there, including birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway with 289 species being identified, but the area has also been important to humans for thousands of years even though its salty water is undrinkable.
The Paleo Archaic peoples once hunted the wooly mammoth and the mastodon along its banks, and later it served as homeland to the nomadic Goshute tribe.
In the mid-1800s, despite its isolation, the refuge served as a crossroads for the nation’s communication and transportation systems, connecting the eastern states to the West. Jackass Mail, Pony Express, and Overland Stage stations once stood on its banks.
The San Antonio to San Diego Mail Line, also known as Jackass Mail, operated from 1857 to 1861 as a stagecoach and mail service.
The name originated from the 400 mules that pulled 50 coaches over the rugged terrain. With watering holes spaced about 30 miles apart but with few actual buildings for stopovers, travelers often camped wherever the stage stopped, so even a rude station came as a relief.
Another mail service, the Pony Express carried papers and letters from St. Joseph, MO, to Sacramento, CA, from April 1860 to October 1861. The riders changed horses every 10 to15 miles at rough relay stations and rode a total of 75 to 100 miles before stopping at a “home” station.
We photographed the historic marker commemorating the Fish Springs station, probably a more hospitable layover. Home stations were spaced every 75 miles along the route and featured bedrooms, nourishing food, and company, so the rider could rest before his next assignment.
Jackass Mail and the Pony Express ended when the transcontinental telegraph system, which crossed Fish Springs, connected San Franscisco with New York City.
The Overland Stage and Freight Company remained in operation until 1869 when the completion of the transcontinental railroad made the need for stage service obsolete even though the tracks ran far north of the springs.
In the early 1900s as more and more newfangled automobiles filled the nation’s roads, the first transcontinental highway was built across the refuge.
Although the refuge once served as an important interchange, it’s now fairly quiet as far as human activity goes.
We were alone as we walked along the interior roads, spotting coots, killdeer, mallards, cinnamon teals, canvas backs, and great blue herons. What surprised us most, though, were the three pairs of whistling swans floating on the brackish water.
Whistling swans, also known as tundra swans, do in fact make high-pitched honking sounds rather than whistling. They’re large, boasting a 66-inch wingspan, and, according to Ted Andrews in Animal Speak, they’re so strong, they can fracture a person’s arms with their wings and fight off most predators.
We felt awed to spot them before they began their spring migration to western Alaska or Canada to breed and nest in the tundra.
As the play Honk! clearly conveyed, swans symbolize the beauty and power within all of us despite our outward appearance, others’ opinions, or society’s views.
As Ugly stepped into the knowledge of his own power and beauty, his proclamation, “I like being different!” brought thunderous applause from the audience.