Black Swan: A Year With Australia's Most Elegant Bird

There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a lake when a black swan glides across it. No splashing, no hurry — just that long neck curving like a question mark, gliding over still water as if it owns the place. And in a way, it does.

I've spent countless mornings chasing that stillness with a camera. Black swans are deceptively difficult to photograph well — their colour is the challenge. Get the exposure even slightly wrong and you lose either the deep black of the feathers or the striking red of the bill. Get it right, and you have one of the most striking silhouettes in Australian wildlife photography.

What drew me to building an entire calendar around this one bird was watching how differently a black swan behaves depending on the season and the light. In the soft gold of early morning, the water turns pink and orange behind them, and the swan becomes almost a shadow puppet against it. At midday, with harsh overhead light, every feather edge sharpens and the red bill practically glows. And then there are the cygnets — grey, fluffy, trailing behind a parent in a neat little line, a scene that never fails to make people stop and smile.

Photographing Black Swans at Jells Park

One of the places I've photographed black swans is Jells Park in Wheelers Hill, one of my favourite spots in Melbourne for Australian birds. The lake there is calm enough on a still morning to give you clean reflections, and walking the loop slowly gives you plenty of angles without needing to get close. I've written more about the park, and the other birds that share the lake with the swans, in My Favourite Places: Jells Park, Wheelers Hill.

A general "Australian birds" calendar would give the black swan one page and move on. This calendar spends the whole year with it — twelve different moods, twelve different waters, one bird that never stops being worth watching.

The Black Swans Wall Calendar is personalised to order — pick your starting month, language, and public holidays — and makes a lovely, understated gift for anyone who's ever paused mid-walk to watch one drift by. If you'd like to see the other single-species birds I've given a whole year to, take a look at my bird calendars.

The black swan also appears on a personalised Black Swan Tote Bag.