If you drive carefully through Bavaria, you can see storks almost everywhere. The long-legged, large, white-feathered birds with black wing feathers and pointed red beaks stalk around in the wet meadows and bogs in particular, looking for mice, frogs and other small prey. Even now, in the middle of December, when there is the first snow in many places. Oda Wieding, the stork expert of the state association for bird protection, assumes that at least 300 storks will winter in Bavaria this year. That is amazing. Because storks are migratory birds. In December they have actually been in sub-Saharan Africa for a long time. At least that’s how you learned it at school.
That is still true, of course. Most of the Bavarian storks cavort in Africa now. But there are also more and more storks that stay here. There are two reasons. “The most important is that until the 1990s there were resettlement projects with storks in Switzerland, Alsace and Baden-Württemberg, which were kept in cages until they reached sexual maturity,” says Wieding. “This was done to prevent the young birds from perishing on the flight to their winter quarters.” These storks simply got used to staying here in winter and later passed the new behavior on to their sex partners and offspring.
The other reason has to do with the climate crisis. Because the winters in Europe are becoming ever milder, many storks are now saving themselves the long flight to Africa and only fly to Spain, the French Rhône Delta or other Mediterranean regions. “They only need a few days to get there,” says Wieding. “That’s why many leave later and later and some even only fly off when the weather is really bad.”
Especially since storks can cope well with the local winter weather. They have thick plumage that they can puff up a lot. The air cushions in the raised feathers protect the birds very well from the cold. “The storks always have a down jacket with them, so to speak,” says Wieding. Searching for food is also not a problem. “Because even in winter there are enough open bodies of water with little fish or a composting facility with mice and other small animals,” says Wieding. And should it get too inhospitable, a stork like that can still fly off to the Mediterranean.