A swan widely distributed in northern Eurasia. Adults have white plumage and bills with yellow bases and black tips.
Adults have white plumage and black legs. Young birds are greyish-brown, with some pink on the bill.
Some whooper swans wintering in northwestern mainland Europe travel to Arctic Russia for their summer moult.
A study published in 2019 examined swans fitted with location loggers in Lower Saxony, Germany, in 2014. Twelve received loggers, and data were recovered from five birds during the following winter. Four non-breeders moved from their early-summer areas to separate sites identified as moulting grounds, all within the Russian Arctic.
One immature bird left its staging area in Belarus on 19 May and reached its moulting grounds on 21 June, travelling a cumulative 2,323 kilometres. Early in the journey it mainly flew stages of eight to fifty kilometres at night and rested during the day, later also flying by day. It stayed nineteen days in the Pechora River delta. Short flights, brief rests and longer stopovers all formed part of its northward journey.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
A 2023 study of the separate Icelandic-breeding population wintering in Britain and Ireland used approximately thirty years of marking records to examine reserve use, survival and reproduction. Birds using three reserves managed for whooper swans had higher estimated survival across age classes than birds wintering outside them, but lower breeding-success probability. The researchers therefore assessed conservation benefits with models combining survival and reproduction. Reserve management includes fox-proof fences, managed roosts and devices making power lines more visible; the study did not isolate the effect of each intervention.