Storks

 My Great Grandmother Lelia Grace Witherspoon Webster loved birds.  Even though she died before I was born, I seem to have inherited that love from her.  Seeing storks on our recent trip to Eastern Europe was thrilling.

These birds migrate all the way from Africa to Europe and typically return to the same nest year after year.  They add new material each year so that some nests have grown as large as 97 inches in diameter, 6.5 feet high, and weigh between a whopping 1100 and 1980 pounds.

There are two nests in this photo.  One is at the top of the tree and the other on top of a chimney. 

Although they originally nested in trees, storks easily adapted to human activity and today call rooftops and chimneys their most common nesting sites.  In Roman times, if a stork built a nest on your roof, it was seen as a blessing and a promise of never-ending love from Venus.

Storks make great parents. 

The adult birds are known for their parental dedication; they continue to feed and care for their offspring well after they can fly.

When Scandinavian parents needed a convenient explanation for how babies arrived, they repeated the story of a stork delivering new bundles of joy down the chimney chute.  After all they do have easy access to chimneys! Hans Christian Anderson wove this folklore into his 1838 fairy tale "The Storks".

A stork caught at the very moment of a baby delivery!