More storks in Vinnytsia village than in Denmark

“I remember a ringed stork that came from Africa; there were also birds from Romania. But our main ‘stork specialist’ Kostohryz will tell you better about them,” Halyna Mynai, the first person I met in the village of Yaltushkiv, told me at once.

Anatolii Kostohryz is a Merited Teacher of Ukraine, who was commissioned by the Academy of Sciences of the former USSR to ring white storks. He has been keeping a record of these birds for some 40 years. Nearly all the walls in the biology classroom are hung with pictures of storks, and a figure of a stork with one leg tucked is on the lapel of Kostohryz’s jacket. He is a member of the Stork Protection Association and a participant in the international symposium on storks. The white stork is a red-listed species. In Poland, for example, energy companies install man-made nests for storks at their own expense so that the birds will not nest on electric poles.

“In Poland, a permission of the minister of ecology is needed in order to get into a stork nest,” Kostohryz quotes Polish researcher Ireneuszka Luga as saying. “According to the data that my students and I gathered from different sources, the number of white storks in Denmark has decreased from 400 to six individuals. In Ukraine, in Yaltushkiv alone, there are 12 stork nests, which makes a total of 24 birds.”

Kostohryz unfolds a map of Brovary raion with marks showing the location and number of stork nests. The research was carried out by the member of the circle. They would take a register, a camera and some food and would ride from village to village by bicycle. They ringed the birds and gave passports to the owners of the farmsteads where storks nested. From then on the hosts became the agents of the circle members. They reported whether the birds came back in spring, how many baby storks they bred, and sometimes even fed them.

Stork nestlings are heavy eaters, so two adult birds cannot feed more than three of them. They throw away the weaker ones. If any of them survive, the hosts feed them. So, a stork named Kasia lived for three years in Yevhenia Dotsenko’s yard. Andrii Mynai recalls that last summer in order to provide a baby stork with food, he caught all the frogs in his vegetable garden and then had to go to the raion center to buy small fish. A stork can eat up to 20 of them at a time.

“It’s too bad he left us in autumn. Maybe he will return this year,” says Mynai peering into the sky. His granddaughter Yulia runs every morning to the nest and eagerly recites a verse she wrote for her stork: “The long-legged bird is very beautiful/ It eats lizards, mice, and insects/ Storks have been friends with people for a long while/ We like storks very much.” Yulia does not count storks in the village — Kostohryz accepts only boys to his circle because this work is not easy. The girls’ job is to keep a record of swallows’ nests.

“One should carry ladders, put together scaffolding to clean the nest from dirt and twigs,” explained Dmytro Plaksin, who studies in the seventh grade. He has not yet climbed to the nests, but his father did this. Kostohryz is bringing up the second generation of stork lovers. Those dealing with storks are fulfilling a noble duty, therefore they cannot behave badly or have low marks. Among them were exemplary schoolchildren from this school and the entire raion. They went to Artek and Moloda Hvardia camps and won all the biology Olympiads.

After the USSR collapsed, Moscow stopped sending to Vinnytsia marked rings for stork registering. That is why nobody is marking them or making experiments with them in Yaltushkiv now.

A stork couple lives between 20 and 25 years and every year returns to the same yard. This spring storks have come to Liudmyla Stetsenko’s yard for the fourth time.

“Our neighbors’ girl Vika and my daughter Vika come running and shouting one before the other, ‘Mom, Ma’am Liuda, storks have come! Then I see the birds bring some twigs, fix the nest, and settle there. These are my storks,” says Stetsenko.

Diana Movchanivska is not so lucky. Storks do not settle in her yard as her house is located near the road. Therefore the woman meets them and sees them off outside the village.

“They clang so nicely as they fly! There is a superstition: if the first stork you see in spring has a partner, you will have one, too. I have been a widow for 20 years and I have not seen a stork couple in all these years.”

Kostohryz can go for hours on end telling about storks and his young naturalists. “It seems to me we would lose a lot if storks disappeared. They adorn Ukraine and make people kinder. This is a sort of a bridge with one’s home and family. I will quote from a former member of my circle, who wrote to his family in Yaltushkiv from Mozambique: ‘Grandmother, our storks are living here. I have seen and recognized them.”