White Stork (Ciconia ciconia): Facts, Migration and Nests

Appearance and identification

The white stork is easy to recognize. Its body, head and tail are white, while the long flight feathers of the wings are black. Adults have a bright red, straight, pointed bill and long red legs. The color comes from carotenoid pigments in their food. A ruff of long, shaggy feathers on the breast is raised during courtship displays.

Males and females look alike, though males are slightly larger on average. Young storks leaving the nest have a duller, brownish-red or orange bill with a dark tip and brownish tinges in the black feathers. They gain full adult colors by their second summer.

In flight, white storks are unmistakable at close range. They fly with the neck stretched forward and the legs trailing well beyond the short tail, unlike herons, which fold their necks. On the ground, they walk slowly and deliberately through grass, picking food with quick jabs of the bill.

From far away, a soaring stork can be confused with a great white pelican or an Egyptian vulture, which have similar black-and-white wings. The pelican has short legs that do not stick out behind, and the vulture has a wedge-shaped tail and a small yellowish head.

How big is a white stork?

The white stork is one of the largest birds in Europe:

Despite its size, the white stork is light for its frame. Its long, broad wings are built for soaring on warm rising air, and it flaps only when it must.

Habitat and range

White storks breed in open country with short grass and shallow water: wet meadows, pastures, river floodplains, rice fields and traditional farmland. They avoid dense forests and areas of tall, overgrown vegetation, where prey is hard to see.

The breeding range stretches from Portugal, Spain and Morocco across central and eastern Europe to western Russia, Turkey and the Caucasus, with a smaller population in central Asia. The biggest strongholds are in Poland, Spain, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. About a quarter of the world’s white storks breed in Poland, and Lithuania has the highest density of nesting pairs.

In winter, most white storks live on the savannas and grasslands of Africa south of the Sahara, from West Africa and Sudan to South Africa. A small number winter in India. Increasingly, many birds from Spain, Portugal and parts of western Europe now stay in Iberia all winter. Learn more in Where do storks migrate?

Diet and feeding

The white stork is a carnivore with a very broad diet. It walks slowly through fields and marshes, catching almost any small animal it can swallow, including:

• Insects, especially grasshoppers, locusts, crickets and beetles
• Earthworms, very important for feeding young chicks
• Frogs and toads, lizards and snakes
• Small mammals such as voles, moles and shrews
• Fish, crayfish and, occasionally, bird eggs and chicks

Storks usually feed within a few kilometers of the nest, often around 5 km (3 mi) or less. They hunt by sight during the day and follow tractors and mowers to catch animals disturbed by the machines. In Africa, flocks gather where grass fires or swarms of locusts provide easy food.

In Spain and Portugal, many storks now feed on landfill sites and on red swamp crayfish, an introduced species from North America. These reliable food supplies are one reason so many storks there no longer migrate.

Behavior and bill-clattering

Adult white storks have almost no voice. Instead of calling, they communicate by bill-clattering: rapidly opening and closing the bill so that it makes a loud, rattling, wooden sound, amplified by a pouch in the throat. A pair greeting each other at the nest throw their heads back until the crown touches the back, then clatter loudly while bringing the head forward again. Clattering is also used in courtship and to warn off rivals.

Chicks are noisier, with hisses, cheeps and cat-like mewing calls used to beg for food.

White storks are sociable outside the breeding season. On migration and in Africa, they travel and feed in flocks of hundreds or even thousands. They soar together in rising columns of warm air called thermals, gaining height before gliding off to the next thermal.

A curious behavior helps them stay cool: in hot weather, white storks direct their droppings onto their own legs. As the liquid evaporates, it cools the blood flowing through the legs, leaving them streaked white.

Nests and breeding

White storks build huge stick nests on tall structures, from trees and cliffs to roofs, chimneys, church towers, electricity poles and specially built platforms. Nests are often reused and added to every year. A large old nest can be 1–2 m (3–7 ft) deep, 0.8–1.5 m (2.6–4.9 ft) wide and weigh 60–250 kg (130–550 lb). Discover why they choose buildings in Why do storks nest on roofs?

The breeding cycle runs like this:

1. Arrival. Males usually return first in late winter or spring and claim a nest. Females arrive a little later.
2. Pairing. A pair forms at the nest with clattering and head-throwing displays. Storks are faithful to their nests, and the same birds often pair again.
3. Eggs. The female lays usually 4 white eggs, sometimes 1–7. Both parents incubate for 33–34 days.
4. Chicks. Both parents bring food, regurgitating earthworms and insects onto the nest floor. In food shortages, parents sometimes remove the weakest chick.
5. Fledging. Young storks make their first flights 58–64 days after hatching and are fed for another one to three weeks before setting off on migration.

Most white storks start breeding at about four years old, though some begin at two and others wait until seven.

Lifespan and predators

Adult white storks have few natural predators. Eggs and small chicks are occasionally taken by large birds of prey or other nest raiders, but nests high on buildings and poles are hard to reach. The oldest known wild white stork lived about 39 years after being ringed in Switzerland, and captive birds have lived more than 35 years. Most wild storks die much younger, especially during their first migration.

The most important causes of death are linked to people. Collisions with power lines and electrocution on electricity poles kill many storks, and hunting along migration routes in parts of the Middle East and Africa is a further threat.

Conservation status and comeback

The IUCN lists the white stork as Least Concern, and its population is increasing. Europe alone holds over 200,000 breeding pairs.

The species has not always done so well. White storks probably benefited in the Middle Ages, when forests were cleared for farmland. From the 19th century, however, drained wetlands, intensive farming, pesticides and power lines caused steep declines. Storks disappeared as breeding birds from Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and, for a time, the Netherlands and Denmark.

Conservation projects reversed the trend. In Alsace and the upper Rhine valley, where fewer than nine pairs remained in the early 1980s, numbers recovered to hundreds of pairs. Reintroduction programs in Switzerland and the Netherlands, protection of wetlands and nest platforms on power poles helped storks return to many areas.

In Britain, white storks had not bred since a pair nested on St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh in 1416. A reintroduction project released young storks in southern England from 2019, and in 2020 a pair raised chicks at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, the first wild-bred British storks in more than 600 years.

Myths and facts about white storks

Myth: storks mate for life. Partly true. Pairs often reunite, but mainly because both partners return to the same nest. If one bird is late or does not come back, the other may pair with a newcomer, and DNA studies show that chicks are occasionally fathered by a male other than the nest owner.

Myth: storks are completely silent. Adults have almost no voice, but bill-clattering is loud and can be heard a long way off. Chicks hiss, cheep and mew.

Myth: storks fly straight across the sea to Africa. In fact, white storks avoid long sea crossings. Thermals do not form over cold water, so most birds detour over the narrow Strait of Gibraltar or around the eastern end of the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus and the Middle East.

Fact: storks have been used to study climate. Records of stork arrival dates going back more than a century show that in parts of Poland, storks now arrive about 10 days earlier in spring than they did in the late 1800s.

White storks and people

Few birds are as closely linked to people. Because white storks nest on houses and return every spring, they have long been seen as bringers of luck, protectors against fire and symbols of family and fertility. The best-known legend is that storks bring babies, explored in Do storks deliver babies?

The white stork is the national bird of Lithuania, Belarus and Poland, and it is a symbol of the French region of Alsace. Storks also played a part in science. In 1822, a stork was found in northern Germany with an African spear through its neck, proof that birds really did fly to Africa for the winter. Today, white storks fitted with tiny GPS trackers are still teaching scientists about migration.