It's Storkling Season!

Storks and babies. They’re a thing, and have been, if not since time immemorial, then at least pretty close. We humans have a long history of associating the great birds with delivering human babies, an idea that stretches all the way back to the Ancient Greeks. They had a story that Hera, the wife of Zeus, was so jealous of one of Zeus’s lovers, a mortal queen named Gerena, that she transformed Gerena into a stork (why a stork? unclear). Gerena-in-stork-form, however, refused to abandon her newborn baby (who may have been Zeus’s child) and instead wrapped him in a blanket, held it with her teeth, and flapped away with him, giving rise to the famous image we have in our heads of storks carrying babies.

Over the years, the concept of storks delivering babies became a convenient fiction for parents who didn’t want to get into the true details of reproduction to answer that inevitable childhood question, “where do babies come from?” The whole thing became, for this writer, repeated into a sort of abstraction: the idea of the stork delivering a baby became more about the people who told it than about the stork itself.

But this time of year, when you see storks with their fledglings, things come into a different focus. You see the mother stork with her grand wings tucked over her new chicks, and you think oh. You think oh, that’s where this comes from. Because you see care. You see protection. You see the delicacy of parenthood in its wild, natural beauty. And then it becomes a little clearer, understanding why people might imagine animals like these caring for human young. A fanciful stretch, sure; but not the most wild of fancies.

This particular stork was photographed sitting in a nest with its young in Riedlingen, a town in south-west Germany. They’re good storks, and we wish them well.

Senior writer Chris DeWeese edits Morning Brief, The Weather Channel’s newsletter.