2. Stork square

Storks arrive in March and depart in late August. They spend the winter in Africa but return each year, preferably to the same nest. They take advantage of thermals (rising columns of warm air) to cross long distance with minimal effort. Since thermals form above dry land, storks avoid crossing the open sea and prefer the routes across the Straits of Gibraltar or the Bosphorus. There are approximately 2500 nesting pairs in Greece. They lay 3-5 eggs that hatch after a month, while the young birds take their first flight after 9-10 weeks. Both parents contribute to their upbringing and supply them with a carnivorous diet of insects, worms, snakes, lizards, frogs, and small rodents. They are voracious eaters and hunters with storks having being observed catching 30 locusts per minute.

A fox one day invited a stork to dine with him, and, wishing to be amused at his expense, put the soup which he had for dinner in a large flat dish, so that, while himself could lap it up quite well, the stork could only dip in the tips of his long bill. Some time after, the stork, bearing his treatment in mind, invited the fox to take dinner with him. He, in his turn, put some minced meat in a long and narrow-necked vessel, into which he could easily put his bill, while the fox was forced to be content with licking what ran down the sides of the vessel. The fox then remembered his old trick, and could not but admit that the stork had well paid him out.

The ancient Greeks had the erroneous belief that young storks cared for their elderly parents by providing them with food and shelter. There was legislation in classical Athens to ensure that children would maintain their parents in their old age. Solon, the famous Athenian lawmaker, stated that any offspring who did not take care of their parents would be deprived of their citizen rights. Any third party had the right to charge someone of maltreatment of parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The belief in the filial piety of the storks survived to a very recent period, with folks tales about young storks covering their parents with feathers when the elderly birds lost their own.

The stork was the sacred bird of the goddess Hera, the protector of nursing mothers. This might be one of the origins of the widespread European folk tradition according to which the storks bring babies to new parents. The legend was popularised by Hans Christian Andersen in one of his tales. It seems that the bird’s large size, the purity of its white plumage, and its ability to fly in high altitudes (somewhat between heaven and earth) contributed to its selection as the bird to bring the babies. Another ancient legend claims that embryos float in the waters of a cosmic ocean and storks discover them as they search for fish.