Storks

Overview

Storks are the tall white birds that nest on the towers, mill roofs, and chimney stacks of the march-towns and corridor towns. They come back to the same nest each spring, and a town watches for them: a stork that does not return means a bad year. Children are told that storks fetch the newborn.

Appearance

A stork stands as tall as a Human's waist on long red legs: a white bird with black flight feathers, a long straight red bill, and a long neck it can fold back on its shoulders. In flight it holds its neck straight out and soars on broad black-and-white wings, circling up on warm air over the fields.

It has almost no voice. Instead a pair greets each other at the nest by throwing back their heads and clattering their bills like wooden rattles, a sound that carries across a town square. A nest is a great platform of sticks, as wide as a cart wheel, built up year after year.

Habitat and Range

Storks nest in the towns and villages of the Confluence Basins and the Lower Serath, and feed on the wet meadows, ditches, and new-ploughed fields around them. They leave in late summer and come back in spring, from somewhere south nobody has followed them to.

Behaviour and Temperament

A stork walks the meadows and furrows with a slow, deliberate stride, taking frogs, fish, worms, grasshoppers, mice, and small snakes. Storks follow the plough for what it turns up. They are tolerant of people in towns and wary of them in the fields.

Life Cycle

A pair returns to its nest each spring and raises three or four young on the rooftop through summer; the young are fed from the parents' throats and fly by midsummer. A stork may live twenty years or more, and some nests have been used for longer than the oldest townsfolk remember.

Uses and Dangers

Storks give nothing but their work in the meadows, eating frogs and mice, and the pleasure of their return. They do no harm, beyond the nest's weight on a roof and its droppings on whatever lies below.

Lore and Belief

A house with a stork's nest on its roof is held lucky and safe from fire, and a town that loses its storks is thought to have done something wrong. A stork that does not come back in spring means a bad year: flood, failed harvest, or fever. Children are told storks bring the newborn from the river, and a family hoping for a child leaves sweets on the window ledge for the stork. Some corridor towns say storks winter where the Serath reaches the sea, which nobody knows to be so.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals