No personal experience, but my father who is a big golfer always said to take a drop if your ball got too close to a swan. Not worth attempting to retrieve it. Things are nasty and will attack.

I worked at a marina in NY when I was a kid. In the spring the swans were used to having the whole place to themselves. You did not want to mess with them, babies or not. They are a BIG powerful animal. I saw 2 of them beat up a big Labrador that ran down onto the dock and try and chase them away.

You made the smart move. Those swans would have fucked you up. They fear no man!

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Long Chile was a silly place.

A few years back, a swan actually killed a guy not too far from where I live. I believe what happened was he was in a kayak & got too close. The swan attacked him & knocked him out of the kayak. It kept attacking him every time he tried to swim to shore & he eventually drowned. So I would stay clear of them

As a child a group of swans began to attack towards me. I can't recall if my parents swooped in and saved me or if I ran and they stopped but either way I've always been leery, but not afraid, of them. Reading the above posts tells me I need to remain leery of them and give them more distance than I do now.

Inland sea gulls in the spring with chicks are a bitch as well. I used to do some flatwater kayaking and would hear the screams of a gull swooping down towards me from the top of a grain elevator some 200m away and dive bomb me flipping me over several times. Now I just wave my paddle at it as it swoops by or stay clear.

Birds have always freaked me out. Must be from reading the short story in HS.

You would have been beaked. We don't have many swans but we do have big fat Canada geese. They've accosted me more than once.

Where I live we have a flock of feral domestic chicken that hang out near a popular trail. The alpha rooster is known to attack runners and cyclists. That's more funny than dangerous though.