In Italy a rosette fixed on a front door signifies a birth in the family: light blue rosette for a boy and pink for a girl. Sometimes a stork makes an appearance too. This was certainly the case with the daughter-made-mum of friends we visited in Italy’s Veneto region. As owners of a considerable vineyard, producing some of the country’s best prosecco, they decorated the approach to their holding with an ample array of rosettes and …. a stork. As it’s been a particularly good year for this bubbly wine, that flowed plentifully.
But why is the stork a symbol of birth? One tells children about that personable bird, making its home on European chimney-tops and carrying the newborn in a bundle to the family, but not everyone knows why the stork has become such an important symbol for births.
For many ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, the stork was considered sacred and was endowed with almost divine characteristics. It was worshipped in ancient Rome where it was associated with Juno, the goddess of fertility and protectress of pregnant women.
At the dawn of Christianity the stork became a symbol of purity and was given the task of hunting snakes which have always depicted sin and debauchery.
The stork’s large wingspan has helped to give the idea of the angelic nature of this extraordinary bird and its disappearance for nine months, when it migrates south for warmer climes in the winter, the length of a normal pregnancy, also enhances the stork’s mythical role.
We have enjoyed stork-watching on the continent but have never come across these birds in the UK except on one rare occasion when a stork took off from a small lake in a Welsh heath. It was a quite unforgettable vision.
STORK
Had you lost your way, mistaken
a wind-tide when I watched you
among Celtic hills far away
and alone in the blue?
You’re quite in the family way;
through the Burgenland
we passed few chimneys near the lake
without your nesting stand.
Untidy heaps yet loved the more
for talismanic force,
no house could be conceived complete
without your vast resource.
Loveable bird, bringer of life
in European plains
Healer of wounds, ender of strife,
through you all earth sustains.
Did you ever then find your way
back to the lake of reeds,
return to favoured chimney stack,
appease our inmost needs?
