Okay so we've all heard that storks deliver babies, but despite having kids and grandkids, I've never actually witnessed the bird's arrival or departure. Just like Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy, they are evidently no-nonsense operators; in-and-out then straight off to the next assignment! But if any of you happen to think that storks (or to give them their full name - white storks) are, like Unicorns or Goblins, just the stuff of fairy tales, then think again as they are very real indeed!
The white stork is one of Europe's largest birds, standing around three and half foot tall and with a huge seven-foot wingspan. They are certainly not fussy eaters; their preferred foods are small mammals, frogs and large insects such as grasshoppers. But they also eat reptiles, fish and occasionally the eggs and chicks of ground-nesting birds. They have been described as 'culture followers', as they actively seek the proximity of humans, whether breeding on rooftops and electricity pylons, or foraging on freshly mown meadows behind tractors.
White storks are native to the British Isles but hadn’t bred here for centuries. The last documented breeding of white storks in Britain was in 1416, when a pair nested on St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. Although storks still visited, a breeding population was lost thanks to a combination of habitat loss (draining of natural wetlands), hunting, and persecution. Stork evidently appeared regularly on our ancestor’s dinner plates! But now they're back, as truly wild breeding birds. A reintroduction programme ‘White Stork Project’ is underway in southeast England. In 2020, the first two wild breeding pairs successfully nested on the Knepp Estate in Sussex. Since then, numbers have grown there each year, to around 20 pairs in 2024! Then in the Autumn of 2024, a Knepp bird decided to call in for a visit to Staffordshire, and why not?!
