Avalus is treating us to a closer look at these magnificent birds, this time including a short video. No photos of delivering babies. I guess they do that in secret.
First a stork preeening…
©Avalus, all rights reserved
©Avalus, all rights reserved
And now a stork doing I know not what. Avalus suggests maybe hunting or possibly yoga. (Avalus apologizes for the quality of sound, explaining he is unfamiliar with video art and editing. He suggests you may want to turn your sound down, but I didn’t find it problematic.)
That is so cool -- looks like he’s hunting! Funny but I’ve seen coyotes do a similar thing where they cock their heads listening, while standing frozen with a foot up in the air. We get cranes here but not storks. So wonderful to see them.
Lovely, especially to see it practising yoga, we don’t get storks here at all. Apparently the state bird of Germany according to my bird book. Oh and they are white storks, there are black storks too, that are … black.
Storks are great. They hunt mice and voles -- which is what the one in the video is doing, probably.
I just saw a report about the increasing stork population in the west of Germany, while the population in the east mostly stagnates: The western population migrates via Spain to Africa, while the eastern via the Balkan. Only that many of the storks have decided that Spain is good enough, making their migration route shorter and less dangerous.