White storks, the birds famous in Europe for stories told to children of how they deliver babies to families, have made a strong return to France after coming close to being declared extinct.
Traditionally the French birds migrated each year, spending the European winter in West African countries, before returning in January and February and breeding in Europe in the spring and summer.
But in 1972, a count showed that there were only 11 breeding couples left in the country, with nine of them in Alsace on the German border.
“The main factor was a series of catastrophic droughts throughout the Sahel region, which were matched by wars and social upheaval which put guns into the hands of poachers,” said Nicolas Gendre who works for the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux, the largest bird protection association in France.
The alarm was raised in France and the birds were fully protected in the country from 1976.
Efforts to save the storks
“We then saw the interesting situation where two different policies to save the birds were adopted, and now with at least 6,500 breeding couples, we can see that both worked.”
In Alsace it was decided to capture the birds, clip their wings, stop them migrating and feed them in winter, effectively making the stork reserves which exist today.
Storks escape from the reserves and end up mating with wilder storks who continue to migrate.
Female storks are attached to their nestsPhotoRK / Shutterstock
Along the west coast of France, especially in the freshwater swamps of Charente-Maritime, a different approach was taken, with the LPO leading an effort to build special ‘stork platforms’ to encourage migrating storks to stay.
This was necessary because many of the old nests were in Elm trees, which at that time were being killed off by Dutch Elm disease.
“The nests built of sticks weigh up to 45kg, and the dead trees could not support them and were being lost,” said Mr Gendre.
“Female storks are very attached to their nests, and we quickly found that if we put up platforms near where the elms used to be, with sticks already on them, the females would settle, but they would ignore platforms where there were no sticks.”
He added that both conservation approaches were very different but they were both very successful, and now storks are nesting all over France.
Conservation challenges
“It is not all smooth sailing, during the drought and heatwave in France in 2022, many chicks were lost, for example,” he said. “But 2024 was a very good breeding year because it was so wet – and we have found that the storks are now feeding mainly on the invasive red crayfish which infest France’s rivers.”
“That is good news because in some wetlands there are three tonnes of crayfish per hectare.”
Another worry is the relatively high mortality of storks around electric wires – their 1.8 metre wingspan means that they are at risk of electrocution if they touch two wires at the same time.
The LPO / RTE cohort, in charge of France’s high tension electric network, and Enedis, in charge of the medium and low tension network, are working together to reduce the risk by moving nests away from danger areas.
*The stork’s relation to the baby myth, might be related to their own breeding habits, scientists now believe.
Stork couples usually mate for life, but DNA testing shows that 10% of birds are born from relations outside the couple, with both male and female birds sometimes temporarily disappearing on their own for a couple of days during mating season.
