Animal · Poland, Ukraine, Spain
White stork
Ciconia ciconia — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The white stork is a tall black-and-white bird with long red legs and a long red bill, famous for nesting on roofs and chimneys. Every autumn it flies thousands of kilometres to Africa, circling upward on warm air instead of flapping the whole way.
Picture credit: Georgi.petrov66 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the white stork live?
Home: in wet meadows and on village roofs.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Poland, Ukraine, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Türkiye, Morocco.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 100–115 cm long. It weighs about 3.4 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
White storks build huge nests of sticks on chimneys, church towers, poles and old trees, and a pair often comes back to the same nest year after year. A nest that has been used for a long time can grow more than a metre across and weigh as much as a grown horse. Storks hunt by walking slowly through wet meadows and fields, watching the ground, then stabbing down for a frog, a beetle, a mouse or an earthworm. Grown storks have almost no voice, so they greet each other by throwing the head back and clattering the two halves of the bill together. Most European storks spend the winter in Africa, crossing at the Strait of Gibraltar or at the Bosphorus, because they need land beneath them. Their broad wings are made for soaring: they circle upward in rising warm air, then glide for kilometres without a single wingbeat. The young hatch from about four white eggs and leave the nest after roughly two months.
Find it on the globe
White stork is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why do storks clatter instead of singing?
Adult white storks have very weak voice muscles and can hardly make a sound. Instead they clap the two halves of the bill together, a dry rattle that carries across a whole village and works as a greeting and a warning.
Do storks really bring babies?
No, that is an old European tale. It probably grew up because storks build their nests right on people's houses and come back every spring, so a family and its storks seemed to belong together.
How far does a stork travel in a year?
A stork that breeds in Europe and winters in southern Africa can cover roughly ten thousand kilometres on each journey. It travels in stages over several weeks, resting and feeding on the way, and young birds usually follow older ones.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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