Feeding time

My friend T and I spent a long time watching this swan family feeding - keeping a family of five growing cygnets fed is clearly a time-consuming business. The technique seemed to be to loosen weed and break it up by trampling it - both adult swans did this and what we saw was them rocking from side to side in the water. They then brought it up to the surface with their long necks and the cygnets fed off the smaller pieces, while the adults ate the larger pieces. If you go large, you can see strands of weed trailing from the adults' beaks. The swans obligingly stayed in the same place for a long time - there was a good gap in the trees/bushes and in addition there was a bench to sit on.