It brings spring, children, new beginnings. When it stalks through the freshly mown meadows on its long red legs during the summer and clatters loudly in the nests in the evening, not only does the natural environment seem intact, but also the moral order. Ancient Greece already invented a word for the myth that stork children look after their parents in old age. And it is not only because of fairy tales such as Caliph Stork that the bird can still be considered monogamous today, although this has long been empirically refuted: fidelity is to the nesting site, not to the partner bird. For centuries, people puzzled over where storks spent the winter, but nowadays it is possible to trace their migration routes in detail using tracking devices. And this also makes it clear that it is changing drastically due to man-made climate change: instead of flying to Africa, they spend the winter in southern Europe and feed on scraps they find at garbage dumps.
Based on his own observations, Johannes Zeilinger tells of a bird about which there is so much more to report than our image of it suggests, despite the 'stork bite', 'stork claw' or the 'stork of the man'.
Non-fiction
Johannes Zeilinger, born in Wolfratshausen in 1948, studied medicine in Würzburg and Berlin, where he worked as a surgeon in private practice from 1983. He is also the author of numerous publications on the work of Karl May, the history of Cyprus and biographical works on Lya de Putti, Frederic A. Cook and B. Traven. In the town of Werben on the Elbe, his second home, storks are his neighbors.
