A black swan has been banned from a town and exiled after ‘terrorising’ tourists and trying to drown other birds.
The bird – nicknamed Reggie by locals – has been tormenting mute swans in Stratford-upon-Avon for the last nine months.
The town’s swan warden Cyril Bennis said capturing Reggie – who he calls Mr Terminator – ‘had to be done’ and that the mischievous bird ‘had attitude’.
‘Other swans appeared to bow in respect and parted to Reggie as he swam through,’ Mr Bennis told The Telegraph. ‘It was extraordinary.’
He will now be rehomed 150 miles away in Devon at the Dawlish Waterfowl Centre.
Reggie did not depart from the River Avon without a fight, with Mr Bennis left ruffled after getting ‘walloped left, right and centre’.
Pictures taken yesterday showed the captured swan sitting in a bag on the back of a trailer, which was hooked to a bicycle.
Mr Bennis said Reggie had been causing ‘an enormous amount of trouble’ in the last few weeks by trying to mate with a white swan.
But he declared that was ‘not going to happen on my watch’.
He told the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald: ‘He’s trying to mate with another swan and we don’t want this hanky panky going on.’
And the ‘swan man’ said he thought King Charles III would be ‘very pleased’ to hear that Reggie was no longer terrorising Stratford-upon-Avon.
‘No word of a lie. It’s been an absolute ruddy nightmare,’ he said.
‘In catching it, it was a handful. It walloped me left, right and centre. And that’s what I’d expect.’
Mr Bennis said the ‘bottom line is we now can rest easy by the fact that the mute swan is safe away from our friend here’.
Reggie had become a local celebrity during his stay in Stratford-upon-Avon, and had even become a tourist attraction with people visiting from far and wide to catch a glimpse of him.
Mr Bennis said he had even become more popular than William Shakespeare.
