“Where do babies come from, mummy?”

Young parents find this often heard question hard to deal with, especially when they feel that the child is too young to have ‘THE TALK’ yet. So they tell it that babies grow in cabbages or are dropped on the parents’ doorstep by a friendly stork. This little white lie will keep the child happy for a while.

Storks (Ciconia ciconia) have always been associated with happiness and prosperity. For many years they were believed to be monogamous, which inspired several cultures to idealize the parental qualities of the bird. Today we know that storks are faithful to their partner during the breeding season, but that they find no harm in taking another partner the following year.

In France storks have always been closely linked to the Alsace, of which they have become the unofficial emblem.

Alsace's unofficial emblem comes in all sizes and shapes!

Their presence goes back to the Middle Ages. Their annual return to the region is first mentioned in 13^th century ‘Annales des Dominicans de Colmar’. There is no known record about their number in those days. In the pre-war years (1930-1940) their number was estimated at 15 couples. By 1945, 177 nests were catalogued. After this date numbers were in rapid decline: from 145 couples in 1960 to a mere 9 in 1974.

Turckheim: Stork's nest on one of the towngates

Worried by this frightening evolution, ornithologists finally took an interest in these elegant creatures. They launched a reintroduction program preventing the birds from migrating during winter. These long flights to northern Africa where they usually hibernate were taking a huge toll on the stork population. By feeding the birds during the cold winter months, when natural food supplies are rare, the ornithologists enticed them to stay put in the Alsace. Thanks to this program many stork lives were saved and by 2005 the population of 21 couples in 1980 had risen to an appreciable 360.

During our recent trip to the Alsace we visited the village of Turckheim, some 20 minutes east of Colmar. As storks like to nest in high places, the people of Turckheim have built five nests on different tall buildings in town. There’s also one ‘wild’ nest on the chimney stack of a privately owned house.

Turckheim is very proud of its storks and therefore takes very good care of them. The current sedentary population is fed daily in the ‘Parc des cignognes’ in a protected zone, where four ‘pensioners’ are still kept in semi-captivity until they lose their migration instinct. This way the town hopes to protect and increase its stork population.

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