Birds
Stork
Ciconiidae · also called storks
A stork is a big, silent, long-legged bird that flies like a bird of prey — soaring on flat wings from one thermal to the next across whole continents. It has almost no voice, so it talks by rattling its bill like a football rattle, and in much of Europe it raises its family on the chimney of a house, where villages are glad to have it.
Overview
Storks are the family Ciconiidae, around 20 species, on every continent except Antarctica and most diverse in the tropics. They are tall, broad-winged soaring birds of open habitats near water, with a heavy bill and, in adults, little or no voice. Diet ranges from the white stork’s frogs, snakes, and rodents to the marabou’s scavenging at carcasses beside vultures.
Bill-clatter and leg-cooling
Storks communicate at the nest by bill-clattering — throwing the head back and rattling the mandibles. In heat they cool down by directing their droppings onto their own bare legs, so evaporation chills the blood, which is why their legs look chalky white.
Nests that outlast people
A pair returns to the same nest for life, adding sticks each year, so a white stork nest can reach 2 m across and weigh hundreds of kilograms, with some sites used by stork after stork for over a century. In 1822 a white stork shot in Germany with an African arrow through its neck — the Pfeilstorch — gave the first hard proof that European birds fly to Africa for winter.
Status
Storks as a family are Not Evaluated. The white stork has recovered and is increasing across Europe, and the marabou is common, but several are threatened — the Critically Endangered greater adjutant, down to a few thousand and largely tied to one Indian city’s dumps and wetlands, plus the oriental, milky, storm’s, and black storks — mostly from wetland drainage, deforestation, and disturbance.
Stork: common questions
Why is the stork associated with delivering babies?
The link is a European folk tradition, strongest in Germany and Scandinavia, that grew from several coincidences. White storks nest on houses and return each spring, around nine months after midsummer weddings, they are devoted parents that fiercely defend the nest, and old beliefs held that they brought good luck and fertility to the household whose roof they chose. Folktales had storks finding babies in marshes, caves, or springs, places also linked to the spirits of the unborn, and carrying them to families. Hans Christian Andersen's 1838 story The Storks spread the image widely, and it became a gentle way for adults to answer children's questions about where babies come from.
What is the difference between a stork, a heron, and a crane?
They are three separate bird families that share a tall wading shape through similar lifestyles. Herons fly with the neck folded back into an S and hunt mostly by standing still and spearing fish. Storks and cranes both fly with the neck stretched out, but storks are broad-winged soaring birds, often near-silent, that nest on structures or trees and feed on a wide range of prey by walking and probing, while cranes are birds of open marsh and grassland that perform elaborate dances, are among the most vocal large birds, and raise the inner wing feathers into a drooping bustle. A large wading bird gliding on flat wings and clattering its bill is a stork.
How did a stork help prove that birds migrate?
Before migration was understood, people had no good explanation for why swallows, storks, and other birds vanished every autumn, and serious suggestions included that they hibernated in mud or at the bottom of ponds, or even flew to the Moon. In May 1822, a white stork was found near the German village of Kluetz with a long, ornate wooden arrow pierced through its neck, and the arrow was identified as a type made only in central Africa. The bird had clearly been speared there, survived, and flown all the way back to Germany to breed. This Pfeilstorch, and about two dozen others found over the following century, gave the first physical proof that European birds overwinter in sub-Saharan Africa.
Why do storks nest on chimneys and telegraph poles?
White storks naturally nest on cliff ledges and in large trees, but they take readily to tall human structures, which offer a stable base, a clear flight path in and out, and safety from ground predators, and they benefit from being close to the grassland and wet meadows where storks feed. In many parts of Europe, villages actively welcome nesting storks as symbols of luck and put up cartwheels or platforms on poles and roofs to encourage them. The birds return to the same site for life and rebuild the huge stick nest each year, so a chimney nest can become a fixture that a household maintains and a village takes pride in.