Birds of a Feather...

Sister Davis has a special fondness for birds.  When she was a girl, she had a yellow parakeet she named Tweety Bird (how original was that?) which unfortunately flew away when she was cleaning the cage in the backyard (she never claimed to be the brightest child).

 And now Sister Davis feels she needs to make amends for that juvenile lapse of judgement by feeding every wild bird she can.  She had three bird feeders in her backyard in Idaho and no matter how much Elder Davis says, " it's a waste of money" she continued to buy birdseed. 

Sister Davis notices birds as she is walking through the parks in Latvia. She notices and takes an interest in them but she has never joined a bird watching club or really studied ornithology all that much.

But she came across something interesting the other day. In the scriptures, birds are mentioned a lot! You would be surprised at how many references to birds that are made through out the Old Testament and the New Testament!   One of the more famous ones.....

Luke 9:58
58 And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head.

The scriptures are full of references to birds, fowls, eagles, sparrows and even storks!

There are 5 references to storks in the Bible and that is what Sister Davis especially wants to write about today.  She may have seen  a stork in a zoo before but really doesn't remember, and seeing storks in Latvia reminded her of a book that she once read when she was a librarian at Berenda Elementary School in Madera, CA. She loved the story and it was written so well , that she has never forgotten it...and really, how many books do we read that can have such a lasting impression on us that we remember it years later? 

The Wheel on the School  was written by Meindert DeJong and it won the 1955 Newbery Medal for children's literature.  Mr. DeJong was born in the Netherlands but his family immigrated to the United States in 1914. There are storks in the Netherlands and this book is about people and storks.

Sister Davis learned a lot about storks from this book...and how storks build their nests and that is what she sees lots of in Latvia...stork nests! 

Latvia has white storks that migrate here in the spring, all the way from Africa, and build huge nests (or borrow one already made).  They are like swallows, when they arrive you know that spring is here. They are fascinating to see....huge nests perched high up on telephone  poles,  old barn roofs, and even on old chimneys .  We usually see a male and female on the nest, and they take turns getting food and sitting on the eggs.

Psalms 104:17
17 Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.

The stork gets as high as 4 feet high and has a wingspan of 6-7 feet so it's no small bird. Its nest is made of large sticks. They eat snakes, frogs, insects and other small creatures (even mice).



Storks were on  the decline for many years. The last wild stork in Belgium was seen in 1895, in Sweden in 1955, and in Switzerland in 1950. With those alarming facts, in 1988, White Storks were put on the near threatened list....  but we are happy to say they are making a comeback!

Now, Latvia has 10,700 breeding pairs of storks and Lithuania has 13,000 (the highest density of storks anywhere in the world!).  In fact, the Stork is Lithuania's national bird.



  Storks are the stuff of legends...they are thought to bring good luck to households, so farmers build nesting platforms for them close to their farm house.

Storks used to be a nuisance when they would build their nests on chimneys...kinda hard to light a fire with a giant bird nest keeping the smoke from going up the flue! So farmers who like storks to keep insects off their farms, make nesting places by adding a circular device to electric and telephone poles...and they work splendidly!

  

So when Sister Davis sees a big stork nest close to the road, she yells, "STOP!" and Elder Davis, who is quite used to his wife's idiosyncrasies rolls his eyes and tries to find  a place to pull over...which isn't always easy on Latvian highways!