April 09, 2004
Forty-Two Storks
I'm not going to blog too much about Caceres, because I was only there for two days. (I'm in New York City now.) Claudia was there for a week, and saw much more than I did. So I'll let her do the travel blogging.
But I do want to mention the storks.
Extremadura, it seems, is one of the major breeding areas for Cicionia ciconia, the European white stork. These magnificent birds spend their winters in Africa, but return to Spain every summer to mate, nest and breed. They build enormous, sloppy nests -- sometimes two meters across and weighing more than a hundred kilograms -- on the tops of trees and tall buildings; they seem to have a particular fondness for old churches.
The people of Caceres are very fond of their storks. (And they should be. The birds are beautiful.) They keep careful track of the number of nests: there are twenty-one of them in the city. Since single storks do not build nests, that means there are twenty-one mated pairs of birds, forty-two storks.
Saturday morning I was out early with Alan and David. We found an open cafe and I drank coffee while Alan ate a croissant. Then we watched a pair of the storks waking up. The plaza where we sat was still dark, but the bird's nest, on the steeple of an old church, was already lit by the rising sun. The storks spread their wings to catch the morning warmth, and bobbed their long heads at each other, weaving their necks back and forth. Then they made their strange call, the rattling cry that sounds just like a stick dragged across a picket fence.
Alan watched all this with great interest. "Big birds!" I said to him, pointing. "Big!" he agreed.
Then one of the storks took off. It circled the old church once, twice. Then it flew out over the plaza, then back, in great graceful arcs, back and forth, gradually rising higher, until it caught a thermal high above the town and headed out for the morning's hunting over the plains.
The stork disappeared into the distance, a speck lost in blue haze. The sun lifted over the tops of the old stone houses and morning sunlight began to pour across the plaza. And after a while we walked back to the hotel.
The pair of storks that lives in the city park of Cáceres.
Posted by douglas at April 9, 2004 12:07 AM