Birds: Stork of Turkey

Birds: Stork of Turkey

White storks are some of the best known and least understood of all of the urban dwellers of the Northern Hemisphere. They nest and breed throughout Europe, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, and migrate south for the winter into sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. They arrive on their southern wintering grounds by October, traveling in large flocks that number in the thousands. They return to their breeding grounds in Spring.

How to Identify White Storks

White storks are easy to identify by their brilliant white plumage, black primary feathers on the wings, and red legs. Largely silent, white storks nonetheless have the most advanced bill-clattering display of all storks. They throw their heads back and clatter their upper and lower mandibles together to create a loud percussive rattle.

We spotted them all over the fields of Northern Spain, while we were on the Camino de Santiago. These birds prefer dry, open areas and avoid cold, wet, heavily forested areas. They are often seen in or near agricultural fields and in pastures where livestock graze.

We have all heard of “stork bites” which are common birthmarks that form on a newborn’s skin, typically on the back of the head or neck. Stork bites appear as pink, red or purple marks on the skin and do not need treatment because they are harmless and will fade over time. The “bites” have led to many of the fables of babies arriving at a home via the town stork. Seems a prudish tradition, but many parents do not want to tell the story of human procreation, preferring to blame it on nature.

How Stokes Live

These long-legged wading birds are opportunistic feeders that take what they can get. They wade through shallow water or tall grass, searching for and stabbing prey with their sharp beaks. Prey may include small mammals such as voles, mice, shrews and rats, as well as large insects such as beetles, grasshoppers, crickets and locusts. They also eat amphibians, reptiles, fish, shellfish and the eggs and nestlings of ground-nesting birds.

They normally forage in groups of 10 to 50 birds but will gather by the thousands when an opportunity to feast, such as a grass fire or locust swarm, presents itself. They feed by day and roost communally in trees and rooftops at night.

The Turkish Fisherman & the Stork [1]

As reported by Ben Hubbard and Safak Timur in a dispatch with the New York Times on March 28, 2024, there have been more than a decade of annual Spring bird sightings happening in the small village of Eskikaraagac, Turkey:

Thirteen years ago, a poor fisherman in a small Turkish village was retrieving his net from a lake when he heard a noise behind him and turned to find a majestic being standing on the bow of his rowboat. Gleaming white feathers covered its head, neck and chest, yielding to black plumes on its wings. It stood atop skinny orange legs that nearly matched the color of its long, pointy beak.

The fisherman, Adem Yilmaz, recognized it as one of the white storks that had long summered in the village, he recalled, but he had never seen one so close, much less hosted one on his boat.

Wondering if it were hungry, he tossed it a fish, which the bird devoured. He tossed another. And another.

So began an unlikely tale of man and bird that has captivated Turkey as the passing years — and a deft social media campaign by a local nature photographer — have spread the pair’s story as a modern-day fable of cross-species friendship.

The stork, nicknamed Yaren, or “companion,” in Turkish, not only returned to Mr. Yilmaz’s boat repeatedly that first year, the fisherman said, but after migrating south for the winter, returned the next spring to the same village, the same nest — and the same boat.

Last month, after Yaren appeared in the village for the 13th year in a row, the local news media gleefully covered his arrival like the springtime sighting of a Turkish Punxsutawney Phil.

Since the story was first reported over ten years ago, the notoriety has expanded. Today there is a children’s book written about the annual sighting, and a documentary filmed about this unusual man-bird relationship.

Do you have a person-animal relationship of note? There may be a good story in the retelling.