At the top of the male swan's list of enemies - which includes snapping turtles, seagulls, small children who throw rocks, and even the elderly woman who's cared for it for 17 years - are geese.
As the rest of the region deals with ragged lawns full of droppings and crops pulled clean from the ground, the houses and fairways surrounding the swans have become a goose-free zone.
The geese might land, but within minutes the male swan will be out of the water in full attack mode, said Shirley Falls, the swans' 77-year-old owner.
"We can have 300 geese flying in, and within two hours he'll have them all gone, every last one," she said. "But he won't bother the mallards."
Mute swans, the species at Wedgwood are a well-known deterrent to geese, said Chris Dwyer, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"It works to some degree," he said. "If it's a large space, the geese will still land, but there's going to be some standoff distance around the swans.
The story of how two swans came to inhabit a small corner of South Jersey suburbia began with a death.
Falls' husband, Victor, a high school math teacher and avid golfer, died in December 1994. About a week later, Falls was looking out the back window that overlooks the golf course when a swan landed on the satellite dish in her backyard.
She'd been living in the house for decades but had never seen a swan there, or for that matter anywhere other than in photographs. The swan flew away two hours later when Falls tried to feed it, but she was transfixed.
"I took it as a sign," she said.
Falls is a long-standing bird lover; she once kept 300 canaries in her living room. Her children went online and found a farm in Pennsylvania that sold swans and that Christmas they presented their mother with the promise that she could expect two swans come spring.
