ABOUT STORKS


Today I want to write about something very different. About STORKS. Why? Because it is about now that this beautiful bird has arrived or is about to arrive to our Northern European countries. 

 The stork is considered to be one of the bird species very much under threat. That is why it is protected in all countries.  And it is also one of the 170 birds, which are under protection by the EU bird protection directive from 1979. 
Denmark is the most northern country in Europe, which the stork visits every year. It is a much less frequent guest than before.  About 150 years ago Denmark had 10.000 pairs of storks every year.  Almost every farm and every house in the countryside had its own storks on the roof or in a tree. 
This is probably also why people for centuries believed that the stork brought the new babies!  People were convinced that this was what happened. Another reason to treat it very nicely.  In Copenhagen the authorities as recently as in the start of the 20th century gave the instruction to teachers that they had to teach the students about what really happened, when a baby arrived !
This did you prevent that it was, of course, the stork which brough the EURO to Europe on January 1, 1999. 
The work stork comes from the old Germanic word sturka. It means somebody with sort of a stiff walk.  Just like the stork!
Do storks talk?  Yes, certainly.  Listen:  https://www.fuglestemmer.dk/hvid-stork/

According to the specialists there are each your about 105-130.000 white storks in Europe. During the winter they are either in Spain or in Africa.  In the summer they are spread over a large part of Europe.  And they normally always manage to come back to the nest they had the year before. An amazing fact. Ornitologists put a tag on most of them to be able to follow them and see what their routes are forth and back. 
When Denmark is concerned 7 pairs of storks have settled down in 2020. This is the highest figure since 1993.  The reason is that there is now more food ( frogs, etc. ) than before. And also that the number of storks in Northern Germany and in The Netherlands has increased considerable during the last ten years.
NOW is the time to see real storks LIVE.  You can do that live around the clock on two different regional Danish TV stations:
https://www.tvsyd.dk/tema/storkene-i-smedager      ( near the border to Germany )

https://www.tvmidtvest.dk/stork     (  further to the north in Jutland ).
In Belgium you have many more storks. A large part of them are in PLANCKENDAEL near Mechelen. The Zoo in Antwerp has a sort of Rest Home for storks there. There are 67 nests with room for 130 storks.
On a trip a couple of years to PORTUGAL we also saw a lot of storks.  Some of them had built their nest on the top of very high power poles, sometimes in several floors. 
And we have also met an impressive number of storks in the small Austrian village RUST at the border to Hungary.  Almost every house in the village has two storks on the roof.  We stayed overnight in a local hotel.  But as the light and the morning arrived it was impossible to sleep, because all the storks seemed to have a lot to tell each other !

See more from RUST:  http://www.rust.or.at/webcam/page/storch.html    



If you want to read more about storks you may find these two links interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_stork 

https://www.storkvillages.net/    ( about a network of stork villages in Europe ).




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