About a week ago, a black swan flew into the Batavia Wastewater Treatment Plant and has been hanging out ever since.
Black swans are native to Australia and it's highly unlikely this rare species made it to Batavia on its own.
The bird is likely an escapee of a private collection.
Because black swans were thought not to exist prior to the 18th Century, when they were unexpectedly discovered in Australia, statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb named his theory of extremely rare events "black swans." (Recommend reading: Taleb's book "Fooled by Randomness.")
I spent more than 90 minutes this morning at the treatment plant, but with 20 mph winds, all of the big birds, including white swans and blue herons, not to mention the black swan, seemed to have sought shelter elsewhere.
A plant worker told me other photographers have been at the plant this past week and successfully captured pictures of the swan. I'll try again on a less windy day, but if a reader has a picture of this bird in Batavia they would like to share, please send it to howard at the batavian dot com (reformat, of course).
Meanwhile, I did get the picture below this morning of some ducks.
