Authorities are reportedly investigating a suspected bird flu outbreak after discovering dozens of dead swans floating in waterways around London's Canary Wharf financial district this weekend.
The Canal and River Trust, which manages England and Wales's historic canal network, logged 24 swan carcasses at West India and Millwall Docks on Saturday and Sunday alone, with additional birds had already been reported dead earlier in the week.
Officials from the waterways charity are said to have alerted the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to the mass die-off.
Avian influenza is considered the most probable explanation, though testing has yet to confirm the cause.
Members of the public have been told to call in sightings of deceased birds but warned against touching or retrieving the bodies.
The sudden deaths mark a grim reversal for London's swan community, which had only just begun bouncing back from years of decline.
Last July's annual census showed population numbers climbing again after falling steadily from 2022 onwards — a drop blamed on previous bird flu waves and violent attacks by humans using catapults and air weapons against the protected birds.
The West India Docks complex, originally built as London's inaugural commercial dock system, ceased operations in 1980 before developers reimagined the derelict site as the gleaming Canary Wharf business hub.
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One volunteer who works with local swan rescue operations told The Times the death toll has already climbed past 30, pointing to what he described as a "serious outbreak of bird flu" concentrated around the Isle of Dogs peninsula below Canary Wharf.
"We have literally got bodies piling up," he said. "There's an artificial island which was being used by the swans. It started off as two died there. By the time we came to bag the bodies up, there were five there. We're just getting a constant stream of birds that are dying or dead.
"I've not had much experience with bird flu. There was an outbreak a few years ago but that wasn't anything like as infectious or virulent."
Local residents started uploading images of swan carcasses drifting in the water to neighbourhood Facebook pages as far back as Tuesday — days before the weekend surge in reported deaths.
A spokesman for the CRT said as per the Times: "We've been aware of the carcasses since the weekend.
"For the carcasses we've been dealing with, we've had to bring in our specialist contractors to remove them from the water. We currently don't know the actual cause, so essentially the authorities are going to be doing tests as to why so many have died.
"The advice right now is if anyone else sees other carcasses or dead swans, we're telling people to report and do not recover them themselves."
Conservation experts at the London Wildlife Trust put Greater London's total swan population at roughly 8,500 birds spread across the capital's rivers, canals and reservoirs.
