Certain acts of consummation would follow, and lo and behold, around 9 months later, babies arrive, which also happens to be the same time when white storks would return to Europe on their spring migration. In many parts of Europe, weddings would traditionally take place on the Summer Solstice and everyone had a massive party. Good babies would get to travel in baskets on the storks back into the welcoming arms of their happy mothers, and bad babies were carried squealing in their beaks and unceremoniously dropped down chimneys to the startled and now inconvenienced mothers below. This rather grim tale was probably influenced by Germanic folklore, where the souls of humans waiting to be born drifted in marshes and ponds the storks would find them as they searched for food. The Storks by Hans Christian Andersen, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons One boy who didn’t receive a deceased sibling was Peter, the lone voice of reason who told the other boys it was wrong to be rude he was rewarded with both a brother and a sister, and is also the reason that Danes also refer to all storks as Peter. When they were all ready to fly to Africa, the storks wanted to get their own back, so the mother conceded there was something they could do: fly to the nearby baby pond and find some dead babies to give to the boys, making them cry. The stork parents would instruct the birds to ignore the silly humans and focus on getting strong for the migration, but the juveniles harbored resentment and dreamed of revenge. ![]() In Andersen’s tale, all summer long, human boys would taunt the growing young storks in their nest, singing rude songs at them. Hans Christian Andersen also played a rather macabre part in cementing this image into public consciousness in his 1839 dark fantasy tale The Storks. Not wanting to leave her new-born baby behind to the wrath / neglect of the Gods, Gerena wrapped the infant in a blanket and took it in her beak and up into the sky. Hera turned this poor unfortunate person, Gerena, into a stork, and ordered her to fly far away from Zeus. ![]() Once again, Hera, beleaguered wife of serial philanderer Zeus, got grumpy about him lusting after yet another beautiful mortal woman. The most well-known stork is the white stork, whose striking black and white plumage and bright red legs and bill make it an easily identifiable bird as they wheel across the sky in long gliding arcs, searching for their nests, for food, and for each other.Ī stork delivering a baby, Courtesy of PixabayĪs with many things, it possibly started with the Greeks, whose tales of jealousy, unfaithfulness and revenge underpin many myths. In the wild, they average around 25 years of age, with some recorded as reaching their mid-thirties. Storks reach sexual maturity around 5 years old, and they live much longer than other birds. They also need to last for years – the energy required to build one is phenomenal, and nobody wants to be doing that every breeding season. These nests must be about 1.5m across, large enough for four eggs. Storks build large, strong nests of thick twigs, grass and mud. You can typically see stork nests on top of chimneys, church roofs, electricity poles, trees, and custom-built platforms made by people trying to encourage them to nest nearby. ![]() This is why they build their nests high up off the ground, with plenty of accessible airspace. They are tall, elegant birds, reaching up to 1.5m from tail-tip to bill-tip, with an average wingspan of around 1.5 to 2 meters, depending on the species (the world’s largest, the Marabou stork, has an amazing span of 2.6m). Comprising 19 species, these waders can be found near rivers, lakes and other wetland areas, their long legs allowing them to slowly prowl through the shallows seeking out their diet of invertebrates, crustaceans, amphibians and reptiles, even crickets and small mammals. Long legs, long necks, long bills and long lives – the stork is a unique bird that few mistake for another.
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