It's good to stork

Long unseen on British shores, white stork chicks are hatching once again in the UK and a colony is now flourishing in West Sussex thanks to a pioneering restoration project, finds Jack Watkins

- 

WHICH birds offer the most remarkable spectacle in the northern hemisphere? A majestically soaring golden eagle? A gabbling overhead flock of geese or swans? Perhaps it's a shock glimpse of a golden oriole or the elusive nightjar. However, it could just as easily be a huge white stork (Ciconia ciconia), although, as with orioles, sightings of them in this country have been so scarce that the older guidebooks to the birds of Britain don't even bother to include them.

In one of Nature's unlikeliest myths, it was once maintained that storks were republicans. The suggestion was proposed to explain why they shunned breeding in Britain and yet nested in Holland, as well as other places in Europe no longer retaining a ruling royal family. The absurd notion was banished in 2020 with news that four wild chicks had successfully fledged on the Knepp estate in West Sussex following a reintroduction using imported birds. By 2023, the chick numbers had risen to 26 and, last year, they reached a remarkable 53. It was enough for Knepp and the local village of Storrington to be designated a European Stork Village and admitted to the European Stork Villages Network. This initiative was set up by the EuroNatur foundation to draw attention to the loss of the wetland habitats the birds depend upon and to encourage communities actively working to support storks. The Knepp story has ancient antecedents, despite the project only beginning in 2016. Although the only known British breeding record for the birds is of a pair nesting on the roof of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. in 1416, bones found in the East Anglian Fens and in other marshy areas show the species was present in Britain in prehistoric times. The Domesday Book records the Saxon settlement of Storrington as Estorchestone, 'the place of storks', and the village emblem features a pair of the birds.