STORIES IN SCIENCE
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  • William Stead's Titanic Dreams
  • Poul La Cour, Danish Inventor, Teacher and Windmill Pioneer
  • The Fault Might Not Be New Madrid's After All
  • Storks are the Stuff of Legend and Life
  • Science Songs to Sing, Getting Ready for a Winter Fling!
  • Fiona, the Female Gopher Frog: A New Year's Story
  • The Scientific Lives and Irresistible Irruptions of Snowy Owls
  • 'Tis The Season to be Snowy and Scientific!
  • Choosing Your Artificial or Living Christmas Tree
  • A Christmas Eve Trip with the Scientific Santa Claus
  • Christmas Presents With No Children
  • Searching for the True Shamrock
  • Flowers are Entwined in Human Grief
  • Poetic About Pigeons and Dewy-Eyed About Doves
  • Novarupta Volcano Erupts and Blows Mt. Katmai's Top
  • Licorice Root to Leeches: Doctoring Progresses in Erie and Warren Counties
  • Licorice Root to Leeches: Doctoring in 19th Century Erie and Warren County Pennsylvania
    • Licorice Root to Leeches: Cholera Stalks Northwestern Pennsylvania
    • Licorice Root to Leeches: Aunt Nancy Range Heals in Pennsylvania
    • Licorice Root to Leeches: George McGuire Catches a Bad Cold
  • Licorice Root to Leeches
  • Science Fiction and Steam-punk Stories
    • Julia Wallingford's Intelligent Powers of Observation
    • The Mad Scientist and the Missing Ingredients
    • Savage Music
  • Speculation and Pure Speculation
    • Ella Thorington Nash Relied on Her "Open Vision"
    • Losing Out in Lovers Lane
    • The Train Chaser
  • Kingsville Digital

Storks are the Stuff of Legends and Life

Picture
One of the ancient Greek story teller and moralist Aesop’s fables is called The Farmer and the Stork. The story goes that a farmer plowed his fields, sowed his seed and spread his nets which caught several cranes who hopped behind him picking up the seed. Along with the cranes tangled in his net the farmer found a stork with a broken leg. The stork begged the farmer to spare his life, arguing that he was not a crane, but a stork. He pointed to his feathers and told the farmer that they didn’t resemble a crane’s feathers in the least. The farmer laughed at the stork and said, “I have taken you with these robbers, the cranes, and you must die in their company.”

The morale of the fable:  Birds including white storks of a feather flock together.

Storks Are The Stuff Of Legend

Stocks have enjoyed legendary status since ancient Egyptian times and people through the ages have believed that storks have human souls and bring good luck. Legend has it that in the year 452 Attila the Hun captured the town of Aquilleia in Italy near the head of the Adriatic Sea because of stork superstition. Attila and his forces had unsuccessfully laid siege to Aquilleia and he rode around the walls, angry and disappointed over the failure of the siege.

Then he saw a stork leaving her nest in one of the towers and flying toward the marshes with her family flying alongside. Deciding that the stork signified a favorable omen, Attila decided that the stork wouldn’t abandon her home unless the towers were doomed to ruin and solitude, so he renewed the siege. He ordered his men to make a larger breach in the part of the wall where the stork took flight. Attila and his men assaulted the walls with wild fury and Aquilleia soon lay in ruins.

A Nineteenth Century madchen-young woman- in North Germany closely observed storks in the spring. If a stork chattered with its bill, it meant that she would break something. If the stork flew, the madchen would be a bride before the end of the year. If the stork stood upright, the young woman would be asked to stand as god mother for someone.

German and Dutch householders often placed high platforms on their roofs to encourage storks to build nests because they believed storks brought good luck.

Storks and Babies

An ancient northern European legend said that storks delivered babies to new parents. German folklore has it that storks found babies in caves or marshes. People would notify the storks when they wanted children by putting sweets for the stork on the window sill. The storks brought the babies to households in a basket on their backs or held them in their beaks. The stork legend spread around the world.

White Storks Flock Together to Migrate

German ornithologist Johannes Thienemann, was one of the first to study stork migration in 1906 at the Rossitten Bird observatory, located in what was then East Prussia. Despite the scarcity of stocks in Rossitten itself, the Rossitten observatory coordinated ringing stork species throughout Germany and across Europe. Between 1906 and World War II, the Rossitten Observatory ringed over 100,000 storks, and between 1908 and 1954, the Observatory recorded over 2,000 storks wearing Rossitten rings.

More modern ornithologists have determined that in August and September, white storks fly from Europe to their winter grounds in Africa where they often congregate in large flocks often numbering over 1,000 birds. In spring, the white storks fly north, arriving back in Europe in late March and early April after about 49 flying days.

During the Middle Ages the white storks thrived because of human activities such as clearing forests for pastures and farm land. Then in the Nineteenth Century the white stork population began to decline and by the early Twentieth Century storks had disappeared from several European countries. In the 1980s, in the upper Rhine River Valley an area closely identified with the white stork for centuries, the stork population had fallen to fewer than nine pairs.

The European Stork Population Is Making A Comeback

In the early Twenty-First Century, European countries are sponsoring conservation and reintroduction programs, and storks are breeding once again in European countries, including the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden. In February 2011, bird watchers in the Netherlands counted 592 storks wintering in the Netherlands, a number up by 100 from 2010.

Reintroducing storks raised in zoos into Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland have stopped further declines in stork populations. In Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands feeding and nest building programs have also help sustain the stork populations. Continuing threats to white storks include draining wetlands, contact with overhead power lines, pesticides like DDT in Africa, and illegal hunting on migration routes and winter grounds.

Storks Without Borders

In partnership with Storks Without Borders, Bird Life in Belgium has been tracking migrating white storks on their route to Spain and West Africa since 1999. They follow migrating stocks and use satellite tracking data to compose a detailed pictures of the migration routes, stopover sites, potential problem areas and threats. They are still tracking one adult white male stork on his fifth autumn migration. On August 30, 2010, he covered 277 miles one day through central France, which is a much longer distance than the approximately 124 miles on the western route across Europe.

As Aesop says in The Farmer and The Stork, birds of a feather including white storks, flock together, but modern European farmers and conservationists don’t kill them, even if they harbor a few cranes in their flock. In Europe white stocks are welcomed, even if they aren’t delivering human babies!

References

Fischer-Nagel, Heiderose and Fischer-Nagel, Andreas. Season of the White Stork. Carrolrhoda Books, 1986.

Schulz, Holger. White Storks on the Up?  Michael Otto Stiftung for Umweltschutz, 1999

 


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  • Home
  • The Reach of Roses
  • Sparkling in Sunshine, Anchored in Wind - The Symbolic, Scientific Spider Web
  • Is Shishmaref, Alaska A Portent of Things to Come?
  • Moonlight Deer Hunting Along the Alpena -Amberley Ridge
  • The Sycamore Tree- Nature and Nurture Combined
  • Are Asian Carp Poised to Invade the Great Lakes? Exploring the Question
  • Dandelions are both Symbolic and Scientific
  • People and Places in Science
  • Dr. Glenn Seaborg-Renaissance Chemist, Renaissance Man
  • Biologist Kerry Kriger is on a Mission to SAVE THE FROGS
  • Madam Sophie Blanchard, "Official Aeronaut of the Restoration
  • Sister Elizabeth Kenny Fought Polio with Physical Therapy
  • Maria Mitchell, America's First Woman Astronomer Demonstrated Women's Scientific Aptitude
  • Father Jerome Sixtus Ricard Becomes Padre of the Rains
  • The 1897 Andree Expedition Tries to Balloon Over The North Pole
  • Thure and Ludwig Kumlien Blazed Trails in the Scientific World
  • Science People
  • The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake: Marquis Pombal Uses Science to Rebuild
  • Increase Allen Lapham, Scientist and Pioneer Weather Forecaster
  • William Stead's Titanic Dreams
  • Poul La Cour, Danish Inventor, Teacher and Windmill Pioneer
  • The Fault Might Not Be New Madrid's After All
  • Storks are the Stuff of Legend and Life
  • Science Songs to Sing, Getting Ready for a Winter Fling!
  • Fiona, the Female Gopher Frog: A New Year's Story
  • The Scientific Lives and Irresistible Irruptions of Snowy Owls
  • 'Tis The Season to be Snowy and Scientific!
  • Choosing Your Artificial or Living Christmas Tree
  • A Christmas Eve Trip with the Scientific Santa Claus
  • Christmas Presents With No Children
  • Searching for the True Shamrock
  • Flowers are Entwined in Human Grief
  • Poetic About Pigeons and Dewy-Eyed About Doves
  • Novarupta Volcano Erupts and Blows Mt. Katmai's Top
  • Licorice Root to Leeches: Doctoring Progresses in Erie and Warren Counties
  • Licorice Root to Leeches: Doctoring in 19th Century Erie and Warren County Pennsylvania
    • Licorice Root to Leeches: Cholera Stalks Northwestern Pennsylvania
    • Licorice Root to Leeches: Aunt Nancy Range Heals in Pennsylvania
    • Licorice Root to Leeches: George McGuire Catches a Bad Cold
  • Licorice Root to Leeches
  • Science Fiction and Steam-punk Stories
    • Julia Wallingford's Intelligent Powers of Observation
    • The Mad Scientist and the Missing Ingredients
    • Savage Music
  • Speculation and Pure Speculation
    • Ella Thorington Nash Relied on Her "Open Vision"
    • Losing Out in Lovers Lane
    • The Train Chaser
  • Kingsville Digital