Stork
Storks are large, long-legged, long-necked
wading birds with long stout bills, belonging to the
family Ciconiidae. They occur in most of the warmer regions of the world and tend to live in drier habitats than the related
herons,
spoonbills and
ibises; they also lack the powder down that those groups use to clean off
fish slime. Storks have no syrinx and are mute, giving no
bird call; bill-clattering is an important mode of stork
communication at the nest. Many species are
migratory. Most storks eat
frogs,
fish,
insects,
earthworms, and small
birds or mammals.
Encyclopedia
Storks are large, long-legged, long-necked
wading birds with long stout bills, belonging to the
family Ciconiidae. They occur in most of the warmer regions of the world and tend to live in drier habitats than the related
herons,
spoonbills and
ibises; they also lack the powder down that those groups use to clean off
fish slime. Storks have no syrinx and are mute, giving no
bird call; bill-clattering is an important mode of stork
communication at the nest. Many species are
migratory. Most storks eat
frogs,
fish,
insects,
earthworms, and small
birds or mammals. There are 19 species of storks in six genera.
Storks tend to use soaring, gliding flight, which conserves energy. Soaring requires
thermal air currents. Ottomar Anschütz's famous 1884
albumen photographs of storks inspired the design of
Otto Lilienthal's experimental
gliders of the late
19th century. Storks are heavy with wide
wingspans, and the
Marabou Stork, with a wingspan of 3.2 m , shares the distinction of "longest wingspan of any land bird" with the
Andean Condor.
Their
nests are often very large and may be used for many years. Some have been known to grow to over 2 m in diameter and about 3 m in depth. Storks were once thought to be monogamous, but this is only true to a limited extent. They may change mates after migrations, and migrate without them. They tend to be attached to nests as much as partners.
Storks' size, serial monogamy, and faithfulness to an established nesting site contribute to their prominence in mythology and culture.
Etymology
The modern English word comes from
Old English "storc", which is in turn related to "stark", probably in reference to the bird's stiff or rigid posture.
Originally from
Proto Germanic *sturkaz . Nearly every Germanic language has a form of this proto language to indicate the stork; the Dutch exception, apparently originating in a euphemism, may signify the presence of a deep-seated taboo: compare "
bear".
* Dutch is an exception within the Germanic language group.Old Church Slavonic
struku,
Russian sterch,
Lithuanian starkus,
Hungarian eszterag and
Albanian sterkjok are all Germanic loan-words.
Rarely the word's origin is linked to Greek
torgos meaning "vulture".
The fable that babies are brought by storks is mainly from
Dutch and Northern
German nursery stories, no doubt from the notion that storks nesting on one's roof meant good luck, often in the form of family happiness.
Species
- Family Ciconiidae
- Genus Mycteria is a genus of large tropical stork [i]s with representatives in the Americas [i], east Africa [i] ...
- Genus Anastomus. ...
- Genus Ciconia is a genus of bird [i]s in the stork [i] family. ...
...
,
Ciconia episcopus ...
Ciconia nigra- Genus Ephippiorhynchus is a small genus of stork [i]s. ...
- Genus Jabiru
- Genus Leptoptilos is a genus of very large tropical stork [i]s. ...
- Lesser Adjutant, Leptoptilos javanicus
- Greater Adjutant, Leptoptilos dubius
- Marabou Stork, Leptoptilos crumeniferus
Symbology of storks
The
white stork is the symbol of
The Hague in the
Netherlands and the unofficial symbol of
Poland, where about 25 percent of European storks breed.
In Western culture the White Stork is a symbol of
childbirth. In
Victorian times the details of human reproduction were difficult to approach, especially in reply to a child's query of "Where did I come from?"; "The stork brought you to us" was the tactic used to avoid discussion of
sex. This habit was derived from the once popular superstition that storks were the harbingers of happiness and prosperity.
The image of a stork bearing an infant wrapped in a sling held in its beak is common in popular culture. The small pink or reddish patches often found on a newborn child's eyelids, between the eyes, upper lip, and the nape of the neck, which are clusters of developing
veins that soon fade, are sometimes still called "stork bites".
Vlasic brand pickles in
North America use this child-bearing stork as a
mascot.
Mythology of storks
Most of these myths tend to refer to the White Stork.
- In Ancient Egypt the stork was associated with the human ba; they had the same phonetic value. The ba was the unique individual character of each human being: a stork with a human head was an image of the ba-soul, which unerringly migrates home each night, like the stork, to be reunited with the body during the Afterlife.
- The motto "Birds of a feather flock together" is appended to Aesop's fable of the farmer and the stork his net caught among the cranes that were robbing his fields of grain. The stork vainly pleaded to be spared, being no crane.
- The Hebrew word for stork was equivalent to "kind mother", and the care of storks for their young, in their highly visible nests, made the stork a widespread emblem of parental care. It was widely noted in ancient natural history that a stork pair will be consumed with the nest in a fire, rather than fly and abandon it.
- In Greek mythology, Gerana was an Æthiope, the enemy of Hera, who changed her into a stork, a punishment Hera also inflicted on Antigone, daughter of Laomedon of Troy . Stork-Gerana tried to abduct her child, Mopsus. This accounted, for the Greeks, for the mythic theme of the war between the pygmies and the storks. In popular Western culture, there is a common image of a stork bearing an infant wrapped in cloths held in its beak; the stork, rather than absconding with the child Mopsus, is pictured as delivering the infant, an image of childbirth.
- The stork is alleged in folklore to be monogamous although in fact this monogamy is "serial monogamy", the bond lastiong one season: see above. For Early Christians the stork became an emblem of a highly respected "white marriage", that is, a chaste marriage. This symbolism endured to the seventeenth century, as in Henry Peacham's emblem book Minerva Britanna .
- Though "Stork" is rare as an English surname, the Czech surname "Capek" means "little stork".
- For the Chinese, the stork was able to snatch up a worthy man, like the flute-player Lan Ts'ai Ho, and carry him to a blissful life.
- In Norse mythology, Hoenir gives to mankind the spirit gift, the óðr that includes will and memory and makes us human . Hoenir's epithets langifótr "long-leg" and aurkonungr "mire-king" identify him possibly as a kind of stork. Such a Stork King figures in northern European myths and fables. However, it is possible that there is confusion here between the White Stork and the more northerly-breeding Common Crane, which superficially resembles a stork but is completely unrelated.
- In Bulgarian folklore, the stork is a symbol of the coming spring and in certain regions of Bulgaria it plays a central role in the custom of Martenitsa: when the first stork is sighted it is time to take off the red-and-white Martenitsa tokens, for spring is truly come.
- A series of sightings of a mysterious pterodactyl-like creature in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley in the 1970s has been attributed to an errant giant stork that become lost during a migratory flight and wound up in an unfamiliar region .
External links
- emblematic uses
- Image documentation
- on the Internet Bird Collection
