Newborn babies are often depicted with a rather incongruous animal: a long-legged, sharp-beaked bird known as a stork. The image of this bird — normally with a cloth bundle dangling from its beak — has become so intertwined with infants that we barely question the stork's ubiquitous presence on well-wishers' cards, baby dress and blankets.
But what's actually behind this association between storks and babies?
Like any myth, its origins are hard to trace, especially since this ane spans the globe, actualization in sociology from Europe, the Americas, North Africa and the Middle East. The array of similar myths suggests that they all depict common inspiration from the birds' most noticeable features. [Why Are Human Babies Then Helpless?]
"The birds are big and white — linked to purity — and their nests are large, prominent and close to where people live. And then, their good parenting behavior is highly axiomatic," explained Rachel Warren Chadd, co-author of "Birds: Myth, Lore and Fable" (Bloomsbury Natural History, 2016).
Many popular accounts trace the myth back to ancient Greece and the story of a vengeful goddess named Hera. According to this story, Hera grew jealous of a beautiful queen named Gerana and transformed her into a stork. The heartbroken Gerana then sought to retrieve her child from Hera'due south clutches, and the Greeks depicted the transformed bird with a baby dangling from its pecker.
But, when doing inquiry for her volume, Warren Chadd discovered that the original myth actually describes the infant-snatching bird as a crane, not a stork. "It can be difficult to verify that one species is associated with an ancient myth equally, for instance, storks, cranes and herons were often confused," Warren Chadd told Live Science. Similarly, in Egyptian mythology, storks are associated with the birth of the globe. Just historically, that legendary creature was actually a heron: "A small-scale stretch of imagination might make that a stork," Warren Chadd said.
Paul Quinn, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Chichester in the Uk and editor of a research periodical nigh folklore and fairy tales, speculated that the link betwixt storks and babies may boil down to this species defoliation. "I recollect the connexion of the stork with infants, particularly maternal care of children, is the effect of the conflation of the stork with the pelican," he told Live Science. European medieval literature associates the stately white pelican with Catholicism, rebirth and the rearing of immature, he said. Somewhere along the way, storks may have become a substitute for this bird.
ix-calendar month migration
Whatever the origins of the myth, historians tend to hold that the thought of the baby-bringing stork was about firmly established in northern Europe, particularly Federal republic of germany and Norway. During the Pagan era, which can be traced dorsum at least to medieval times more than 600 years agone, it was common for couples to wed during the annual summertime solstice, because summertime was associated with fertility. At the same time, storks would commence their annual migration, flight all the way from Europe to Africa. The birds would then return the following spring — exactly 9 months afterwards.
Storks "would migrate and then render to have their chicks in leap around the same fourth dimension that a lot of babies were born," Warren Chadd said. Thus, storks became the heralds of new life, spawning the fanciful thought that they had delivered the human babies. [Why Pregnancy Really Lasts 9 Months]
As the story evolved over time, its complexity grew. In Norse mythology, storks came to symbolize family values and purity (based largely on the inaccurate conventionalities that these birds were monogamous). In kingdom of the netherlands, Deutschland and eastern Europe, storks nesting on the roof of a household were believed to bring proficient luck — and the possibility of new birth — to the family beneath, Warren Chadd wrote in her book.
Although Europe was the epicenter of the myth, it took shape in the Americas too, she told Live Science. "It is interesting that the aforementioned story occurs in Sioux legend with a different type of stork, the wood stork [Mycteria americana], as opposed to the white stork [Ciconia ciconia]," she said. "They all arise from different people's observation of behavior wherever storks — particularly white storks — can be institute."
So, in the 19th century, the myth gained new traction as a symbol of birth, when it was popularized past Hans Christian Andersen in his version of the fable, called "The Storks." In this tale, these birds plucked dreaming babies from ponds and lakes, and delivered them to deserving families. The story had a dark underside, however: Families with ill-behaved children would receive a dead baby every bit penalisation from the stork.
The tale sought to teach children a moral lesson and likewise kept with the new tradition of "'infantilizing' fairy tales — the growth of a specific literature for children, oft didactic and religious in intent," Quinn said.
In Victorian England, the story became especially valuable as a mode of obscuring the realities of sexual practice and birth. "For Victorians embarrassed about explaining the facts of life, the stork bringing a babe was a useful image — modesty to the point of prudishness," Warren Chadd said.
Views on childbirth may be less prudish today, only nosotros nonetheless hang on to the stork myth, celebrating the graceful bird and its central role in family life. "People beloved stories," Warren Chadd said. Our tendency to humanize animals has made the baby-delivering stork i of our most enduring myths, she added, "loosely based on the birds' behavior but also rooted in homo hopes and fears."
Original article on Live Science.
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