In Greek mythology, they were associated with stealing babies after Hera turned her rival into a stork, and the stork-woman attempted to steal her son. In Egyptian mythology, the soul of a person—the ba —was usually represented by a stork. The return of a stork meant the return of the soul, at which point the person could become animated again.
In Norse mythology, the stork represented family values and commitment to one another. In several mythologies, storks are also a symbol of fidelity and monogamous marriage because storks are widely believed to mate for life. Storks are also represented in Chinese, Israeli, and various European cultures mythologies, but the association of storks bringing couples a newborn baby is believed to have started in Germany several hundred years ago.
The natural behaviour of storks lends a clue to their association with birth. As a migratory bird, white storks would fly south in the fall and return to Europe nine months later. It was thought that storks would fly to some mysterious land where they could pick up infants to bring back to their future mothers and fathers. When nosy kids asked where exactly the storks were coming up with babies, the answer was apparently the forests and woods of Europe.
Babies souls were said to live in everything from ponds to trees to caves, and storks were going to retrieve them for deserving parents. He has suggested that people who saw pelicans in flight may have thought they were storks carrying something in their beaks, and because of the existing association with new life they deduced that they were carrying babies.
It is possible that the migratory habits of storks also contributed to the spread of the myth. In Pagan times it was traditional for couples to get married on the Summer Solstice, a day that represents the sun, fertility, and prosperity.
Coincidentally storks would begin their annual migration to their wintering grounds in Africa at around the same time, before returning to northern Europe nine months later for breeding season, just as all the newlyweds were giving birth to their honeymoon babies.
By the Medieval era, folklore surrounding storks delivering babies was widespread across northern Europe, particular in Germany.
The storks would bring them back to households to their expectant parents and either hand them over to the mother or drop them down the chimney; naughty children would be carried in their beaks, while good children would ride in a basket on their backs. To encourage storks to bring a newborn bundle of joy, children who wanted a baby brother or sister would sing to the storks, or place sweets for the stork on the windowsill.
They will hang one, And fry another; They will shoot a third, And roast his brother. In the 19th century the story was popularised by Hans Christian Andersen in a gruesome tale in which four young storks are taunted by a group of small boys. One boy called Peter tries to stop them but they continue to sing songs about hanging, burning, cooking, and drowning the storks.
All of the boys who did not sing the songs are rewarded with a new brother or sister, while the boy who led the singing has a dead baby delivered to his house.
As a special reward, Peter is given both a brother and a sister and the mother stork tells her sons that from now on they will all be called Peter. Most people take for granted that human babies are produced through sexual reproduction, but over the years some scientists have put forward an alternative theory as a way of proving that correlation does not imply causation; the theory of the stork.
There are claims that George Udny Yule 18 February — 26 June , an English statistician and author of the influential textbook Introduction to the Theory of Statistics , noted that in Alsace villages the number of new born babies correlated with the number of nesting storks. He apparently wanted to show that although one could erroneously conclude that storks do actually deliver babies, the answer is much more simple. Larger villages have more houses and therefore more roofs on which storks can build nests.
Larger villages also house more families who produce more babies, so in this case the confounding factor is the size of the village. However, there is little evidence that this is anything but an apocryphal story, first mentioned by Jerzy Neyman April 16, — August 5, , a Polish mathematician, in a research paper he wrote in The white stork is a tall, elegant bird that has almost completely white plumage except for contrasting black flight feathers.
It has a conspicuous long, pointed bright red bill and bright red legs. The colour is derived from carotenoids in its diet. Archaeological records dating back at least , years provide significant evidence that the white stork bred throughout the UK. There are also a few place names that record the presence of storks such as Storkhill in East Yorkshire and Storrington in West Sussex, listed in the Domesday Book as Estorchestone, meaning a place well known for storks.
But the last record of breeding storks is from when a pair nested on the roof of St. Paul Quinn, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom and editor of a research journal about folklore and fairy tales , speculated that the link between storks and babies may boil down to this species confusion.
European medieval literature associates the stately white pelican with Catholicism, rebirth and the rearing of young, he said. Somewhere along the way, storks may have become a substitute for this bird. Whatever the origins of the myth, historians tend to agree that the idea of the baby-bringing stork was most firmly established in northern Europe, particularly Germany and Norway.
During the Pagan era, which can be traced back at least to medieval times more than years ago, it was common for couples to wed during the annual summer solstice , because summer was associated with fertility. At the same time, storks would commence their annual migration, flying all the way from Europe to Africa.
The birds would then return the following spring — exactly nine months later.
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