My Turkish friend, Zeynep, emailed me to tell me how seeing the first White Storks (Leylek) coming back to Anatolia in the Spring has the same effect on her as the fall of migrants I just described had on me. Humbling. Magical.
The storks in the picture are not Turkish storks but French storks, nesting on a friend's house in the Pas de Calais/Somme region. The story is that he rehabilitated an injured female stork, which remained in his garden almost like a house pet. The following Spring, a male arrived and fell in love with her. In the Autumn, when all the other Storks in the area leave to winter further south, this male stays with his mate as she is not programmed to migrate. And this will be the third year they have had babies.
Oh my, I'm a sucker for a really mushy love story.
1 comment:
Like all migrating birds, storks move south in the winter to where the climate is better, and where there is food, and move north in the summer for the same reasons, and to breed. Just like swallows and martins and all the others.
The storks that stay all year round at my friend Etienne's place are exceptional. She was reared as a baby so never knew about migration, and the male stays with her. They find food by moving down to the coast and feeding on invertebrates that they find in the mud.
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