ShawneeDispatch.com

Every morning and afternoon, David Isabell feeds more than 150 hungry, honking guests behind his house.

David Isabell feeds corn to a group of swans and Canadian geese on Bear Lake as the evening sun sets over the trees.

Isabell lives in front of Bear Lake, between Bonner Springs and Tonganoxie, where for the last two years a flock of Canadian geese, nine trumpeter swans and two other birds have called home.

"I don't know where they came from," Isabell said of the swans.

"You could tell they came a long way," he said of the swans' first appearance. "They ate and ate and ate."

Isabell, a retired city manager for Kansas City, Kan., estimated he feeds all the birds 25 pounds of dried corn a day.

At least four of the swans came from a reintroduction program in Iowa.

See a photo gallery of the swans

Dave Hoffman, a technician with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, was responsible for putting the identification collars on four of the trumpeters that reside at Bear Lake.

When told last year the numbers on four of the Bear Lake swans' collars, he recalled them instantly.

He said that one of them, a male marked "F02," was one of the oldest swans released through the Iowa program. The bird originally came from Washington State and was released in 1995, he said.

He said three of the other birds were the offspring of F02.

Hoffman said last year there had been 27 reports of sightings of where F02 had been since 1995.

He said Kansas ranked third after Iowa and Missouri for sightings of trumpeter swans.

Madeleine Linck, a biologist and administrative assistant for the Trumpeter Swan Society, based in Maple Plain, Minn., said the swans, the largest waterfowl species on the continent, are native to North America.

By 1900 the birds were hunted nearly to extinction, she said.

In 1935, the U.S. government established the Red Rock Refuge in Montana to protect the swans. Gradually, their numbers increased, through the refuge and the work of states such as Iowa.

Iowa began its restoration project in 1995, raising the birds from zoo eggs. As of 2005, Hoffman said the program had released 570 trumpeter swans.

With the help of reintroduction programs such as Iowa's, Linck said the birds' breeding population has increased to about 5,000 in the contiguous United States, mostly in 15 states, with about 4,000 of them in the Midwest. There are now about 23,000, she said, throughout North America.

However, Linck said, most states still list the trumpeter swans as either threatened or endangered.

Bear Lake is a private lake; it, together with 83 acres on the other side that is designated a state wildlife sanctuary, provides the birds a safe haven from hunters.

The swans at Bear Lake, whose wingspan Isabell said can reach seven feet, first came to the lake after a flock of mute swans -- so-called because they don't honk -- came to the lake in February 2004.

The mute swans left in March that year, coming back in December, and did the same last year.

When the trumpeters returned this time, another, much smaller bird came with them: a yellow-eyed, red-footed Egyptian goose.

Isabell said he didn't know whether the bird escaped from a zoo or somehow got lost while migrating over the arctic.

The Egyptian goose, Isabell said, is sometimes picked on by the other birds, but a bird Isabell has dubbed Mother Goose -- because the pilgrim goose resembles the children's picture book character with her big beak and grey feathers -- serves as his protector.

"She doesn't take crap from anyone," Isabell said. The pilgrim goose nips at and honks at the swans and other geese when they bother the Egyptian goose.

His wife, Patricia Isabell, said the birds make their house's location a "perfect spot."