A stork with foreign rings visits village Svoboda, region Chirpan

Signals about the bird were sent to us also from telephone 112 and a team of the Rescue center visited the village to get closely acquainted with the case. As we presumed this was the latest guest from Europe, who taking advantage of the warm weather had chosen to spend the winter near the village. According to ancient Bulgarian custom the local people have treated their feathered guest with enviable hospitality and they have fed the stork with different foods, some of them appropriate, others not quite. The fact that the bird visited several times different traditional Christmas tables with freshly roasted pork is quite interesting. Within several days the white stork has become a local attraction, especially with its two coloured rings. Subsequently we established that the rings prove the polish origin of the bird and they were probably placed by our colleagues.

Several things are interesting in this whole story. In the first place the extremely benevolent behavior of the local community. Most of the people in the village were rather concerned about the stork mainly about how it could survive the winter and what would happen to it in the future. Everybody was convinced that because we are at the spot it is mandatory the bird to be caught and put in a closed, save and warm place. The behavior of the bird impressed the team of the Center, because the stork was completely imprinted towards the people – so there is a probability that this animal has been raised in captivity and then it was marked and released free.

Certainly besides the interesting and curious facts of this story most of the above described things have their relevant biological explanations. Although the white stork is a migrating species, accomplishing migrations all the way to South Africa, a small part of the population can quite normally spend the winter on the Balkan peninsula, especially in the more southern countries of the peninsula during warmer weather.

It is also quite normal a single individual of the species to look for a safe place to sleep on tall trees or, as in this case, outlying houses of a settlement where there are less terrestrial predators and the people are friendly. Certainly this stork’s extreme fondness of the people is not a frequently encountered phenomenon in the wild nature.

As we can see despite its fondness of the human, still the animal has embarked on migration and has adapted normally to the wild conditions of life, although in its own manner.

Another interesting fact is that in practice not all birds migrate to the end point of the migration route. Probably this is again related to the climate of the given year. During warmer winters part of the birds remain in the southern countries of Europe. Certainly this can change with sudden variations of the weather and these same birds, like the one described above, when there are sudden variations, they again embark on migration and cross the Mediterranean. Most probably this is what will happen to our hero of village Svoboda during the expected future cold spell during the New Year’s holidays.