Danes Launch Effort to Save White Stork

Ornithologists say the European white stork, a fabled carrier of good fortune and babies for centuries, is in danger of becoming extinct.

Bird watchers are waiting to see how many storks return from their annual migration. Last spring, only 15 came back to Denmark, their northernmost meeting point in Europe.

That compares with an estimated 4,000 breeding pairs a century ago. Similar reductions in the number of white storks, once common as far south as the Balkans, have been reported elsewhere in Europe.

Hans Skov of the Ornithological Society said the number of storks in Denmark had declined by half in only a decade and “at this rate will disappear altogether by the year 2000.”

He and aides are putting wagon wheels dressed with straw on farmhouse roofs, telephone poles and chimneys as convenient nesting places for the storks when they complete the 7,500-mile journey from southern Africa.

White storks are considered good omens, particularly of fertility, and traditionally have been encouraged to build their nests on housetops.

Wagon wheels were a form of encouragement to storks in the Middle Ages, when it was believed a stork on the roof brought good luck to the house, Skov said in an interview.

Bird lovers should be careful to provide favorable nesting conditions because modern tile roofs are slippery, a poor foothold for the birds, he said.

Most of Denmark’s remaining storks live on the Jutland peninsula in the North Sea. Ornithologists say about nine of 10 storks return from their annual migration to a spot within less than 350 feet of their old nests.

White storks, which have wingspans of 6 1/2 feet and weigh about 9 pounds, are on the retreat all along their migration route, Skov said.

African drought and human expansion into bird habitats took a toll in the 1980s, he said, and the birds are hunted in Lebanon.

Use of chemical fertilizers and the draining of fields for farming have destroyed European wetlands where storks fed on toads, snakes and insects, but the largest single cause of adult stork deaths may be high-tension power lines.

Electrocution kills about half the adult storks that die in Denmark and about 70% in West Germany, Skov said.

When the wild stork neared extinction in the Netherlands in the 1970s, the Society for the Protection of Birds began a rehabilitation project. Adult birds were induced to mate in controlled conditions at a “stork village” in Groot-Ammers, a western town, and at 12 breeding stations around the country.

Offspring were released at selected locations. Erik Wanders, a spokesman for the society, said the Netherlands now has more than 200 “project storks.” “Project storks tend to migrate less than wild storks,” he said. “They hang around the places where they were released, and most of them remain here during the winter.”