Not Really That Good Around Babies - Storks

Pics : 1 - 4 = Lesser Adjutant Stork ; Kaziranga & Manas National Parks | Pics : 5 - 7 = White Stork ; Masai Mara National Reserve | Pics 8 - 10 = Wolly Necked Stork ; Jawai | Pics : 11 - 12 = Black Necked Stork ; Kaziranga National Park | Pics : 13 - 14 = Asian Openbill Stork ; Kaziranga National Park | Pics : 15 - 16 = Black Stork ; Masai Mara National Reserve

Look at my guy over in Pic : 1 and tell me if you’d trust your baby with him. No way I would. That scary face and those stabbers with my baby ? No way ! Well, it’s not him they tell kids that brought them, its his cousin over in Pic : 5. Sure this one’s cuter but with those face stabbers ? Really?

Lore about animals doesn’t get crazy only here in India apparently. Europeans came up with this one about the white stork bringing babies to avoid difficult conversations with kids and it just skyrocketed with this story called “The Storks” by Hans Christian Andersen, written in 1839. The thing probably was that the migration times of Storks coming into Europe coincided with the coming of babies after winter cause well, you know, winter and the parents had explaining to do. Storks are pretty common in Europe and were probably even more so then and if anyone was paying attention to some of their behavior around the stork’s own babies maybe they’d give this whole explanation a miss but then, who really cared? It was a kids story anyway and I’ll come to the behavior in a bit.

There are around 20 kinds of Stroks around today and they’ve been around for 50 million years, give or take 10 mil or so. The word ‘Stork’ has been around since middle English, from the 12th Century before which it was probably spelled ‘Storc’. Now get this, no species of storks is known to have gone extinct. That’s huge success for that much time in my book. They come as large as 152 cm tall and 9 kgs to as little as 75 cms tall and 1.3 kgs. Migration for these guys is taught and not inate as the case with many other species and young birds are sometimes denied migration with a set group. They’re carnivorous predators who feed on reptiles, small mammals, insect, fish, basically pretty much anything that they can get their beaks on ; the shape of which has evolved over time due to what they usually get them on in their surroundings.

Legend and lore about these guys goes back to the stories from Ancient Egypt where they were considered to be among the most powerful animals. To the Greeks and Romans they were models of good parenting. See where this is going yet? Storks were thought to care for their aged parents. The Greek word for Stork is Pelargos. and a Greek law called Pelargonia required citizens to take care of their ageing parents.

The seeing of Storks as good and stable parents and home builders isn’t surprising though. Firstly, they’re big birds and easy to observe, then there’s the fact that there was probably a lot of them around back in those days and people saw these big birds building these big, stable nests with a lot of effort that they returned to year after year and living a mostly monogamous, good life, constantly adding onto their nests.

The twist in the tale of Storks comes in their habit of the practice of parental infanticide especially among the ones supposedly responsible for bringing babies. Yep, they drop their kids out of those huge nests. It’s usually the weakest that get oops’ed and is most probably a way of resource allocation especially when there’s shortage. Not bad strategy actually but rather cold and Mother’s usually aren’t seen being that cold to their kids in nature. They’re not the only birds that do this by the way. Other species have been observed doing it too it’s just ironic to me that we had to pick the ones that do this to be the flag bearers of child bringing for our kids. Maybe they get credit cause the decision is just so heart breaking for the normal Human parent and that’s what makes them good parents cause they choose to do this to help the other children survive. I dunnoo. It’s too much thought to be invested towards a fairy tale. Most of those are completely nonsensical to the modern Human mind anyway and should be done away with according to me.

We know a lot more, we know better and we’re so involved with Human Society most of our lives that we should do away with the wrong impressions based on fictional tales that dictate how we feel about certain animals as a species. They’re not doing good, bad and evil like us or as written in our books. They’re just surviving with the sensibilities that we develop in just a couple of years of age. You cannot expect an animal to suddenly evolve empathy when it just doesn’t have any as a species or blame a carnivore for trying to eat you no matter how much you’ve fed it in the past. Animals just have different senses and feelings tweaked differently as per the species.

Well, at least they picked the pretty White Stork and not the scary Lesser Adjuant One. Wait ! I think they don’t have those over in Europe. Right.