--- title: "Rescuer pulls a treble fishing hook from a cygnet’s neck before a crowd at St Ives; 1.8 million likes" url: https://badiyaa.com/st-ives-swan-fishing-hook-rescue-video/ published: 2026-11-02T05:48:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-02T05:48:00+00:00 section: Pets & Animals publisher: Badiyaa --- # Rescuer pulls a treble fishing hook from a cygnet’s neck before a crowd at St Ives; 1.8 million likes The Waterfowl Sanctuary's three-minute YouTube Short shows swallowed line being lifted from a young mute swan's throat on a riverbank; the charity says it x-rays any bird in doubt. A volunteer swan rescuer knelt on a riverbank in St Ives, England, pushed a treble fishing hook back out through the skin of a young swan’s neck, and drew a length of swallowed line up out of its throat while a crowd of onlookers watched. The three-minute clip, posted on October 25 by the UK charity The Waterfowl Sanctuary as @thewaterfowlsanctuary, had passed 1.8 million likes and 23,000 comments on YouTube by the start of this week. The bird was a cygnet, still in the gray plumage mute swans wear for their first year. In the caption the rescuer wrote that several people had phoned in because the spot is a popular visitor location, so a gathering had formed before the team arrived. The caption also carries a warning that commenters keep repeating back: “Don’t try this at home folks.” ## Why a treble hook is the worst kind A treble hook has three barbed points on one shank. Once one point is through skin, the other two snag on anything nearby, which is why rescuers cannot simply pull it back the way it went in. The sanctuary says it does this work frequently and has an x-ray machine at its hospital, so any bird with a doubtful swallow goes back for a scan and sometimes surgery. This cygnet was lucky: the hook came out cleanly, the line lifted without resistance, and the bird went straight back to its family on the water. Lost tackle is a long-running problem for Britain’s swans. The mute swan population in England fell sharply between about 1960 and the early 1980s, mainly because birds were swallowing lead shot and discarded lead fishing weights while grazing the riverbed. Numbers recovered once lead weights were largely replaced; The Swan Sanctuary in Shepperton, which runs a 24-hour rescue line, says hooked and “tackled” birds remain a continuing problem even now. The UK now holds roughly 22,000 mute swans, about 5,300 of them breeding pairs, and the Crown still technically owns every unmarked bird on open water. Hooks and monofilament line are the modern version of that threat. Conservation groups file them under “abandoned, lost and discarded fishing gear,” a category that includes everything from ocean gillnets to a balled-up tangle of line left on a towpath, and even that small tangle can kill a bird. ## What to do if you see a hooked bird: the Badiyaa guide This is our advice for a reader who comes across a swan trailing line or with a hook in its bill or neck. - Do not grab the bird. An adult male mute swan weighs 10 to 12 kilograms, defends itself with the bony spurs in its wings, and a panicking swan with a hook in its throat can drive the line deeper. - Do not cut the visible line short. Rescuers use the trailing end to work out where the hook sits and to lift swallowed line back up, which is exactly what happens in the St Ives clip. - Note the exact location and whether the bird can still swim and feed, then stay at a distance so it does not flee onto open water. - In England and Wales, report it through the RSPCA’s “Report a concern” line; local swan charities such as The Waterfowl Sanctuary, which lists its phone number on its site, often get to a riverbank faster. In Scotland and Northern Ireland the equivalent national animal charities take the call. - In the US and Canada, mute swans are an introduced species and are not federally protected, so the call goes to your state or provincial wildlife agency or a licensed wildlife rehabilitator rather than a federal line. Anglers can do the simplest thing of all: take every scrap of line, every hook and every split-shot weight home. The sanctuary funds its hospital through donations listed on its website, and the comments under the clip are full of people asking how to give. The cygnet in the video will keep its gray feathers until it is about a year old and should be flying with its parents by now; young mute swans can fly 60 to 65 days after hatching. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Mute swan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mute_swan) - [Wikipedia: Ghost net (abandoned fishing gear)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_net) *Image: Ryan Hodnett, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*