White stork

White storks walk slowly through fields and marshes.

They look down and grab food with their beaks. They eat bugs, frogs, worms, fish and mice.

A white stork hunts by walking slowly with its bill pointed at the ground, looking for food. When it spots something, it jabs its bill forward and grabs it.

Storks eat many kinds of small animals: insects, spiders, earthworms, frogs, tadpoles, fish, lizards, snakes, mice and other small mammals. In dry years they eat mostly insects and mice. In wet years they eat more water animals. When swarms of locusts or caterpillars appear, storks feast on them.

White storks forage by sight, walking with the bill pointed toward the ground and jabbing forward to seize prey. Animal Diversity Web lists insects, scorpions, spiders, earthworms, crustaceans, frogs, toads, tadpoles, fish, lizards, snakes, rodents and other small mammals, and the eggs and chicks of ground-nesting birds.

The diet tracks local abundance. In dry years storks take mainly insects and mice, and in wet years mainly aquatic animals. Outbreaks of plague insects, such as desert locusts and armyworm caterpillars, become an important food where they occur. Animal Diversity Web also notes that storks help control farm pests such as grasshoppers.

White storks clap their beaks together to say hello.

Clack-clack-clack! They fly south in huge groups.

Partners greet each other at the nest with a noisy display: they throw their heads up and down with their wings spread and clatter their bills together like castanets.

Many pairs stay together year after year. Outside the nesting season, storks gather in groups. On migration and in their winter homes, flocks of hundreds or even thousands of storks travel and feed together.

Communication is largely visual and tactile. When a female rejoins her mate, he performs the 'head-shaking crouch', lowering himself into the nest and shaking his outstretched head; the pair then bonds with the 'up-down' display, pumping their heads with wings spread while clattering their bills. Pairs make soft sounds to each other at the nest and loud warnings at intruders.

Animal Diversity Web describes long-lasting pair bonds from the age of three or four. Breeding pairs nest in small, loose groups; non-breeders may form flocks of 40 or 50, and on migration and in winter quarters storks gather in groups of hundreds or thousands.

There are more white storks now than before.

People protect the wet places where they feed. Storks are nesting in Britain again!

White storks are listed as Least Concern, and their numbers are growing. During most of the 1900s their numbers fell, mainly because more intensive farming destroyed the places where they fed.

Since then they have bounced back, helped by changes in how land is used and by protecting wetlands. In Britain, the last record of wild storks nesting was in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1416. A project at Knepp in Sussex, England, began releasing storks in 2016, and two wild pairs nested there in 2020.

The IUCN lists the white stork as Least Concern (global assessment, 2025), with an increasing trend and an estimated 526,000 to 588,000 mature individuals. Animal Diversity Web attributes the decline of breeding populations through most of the twentieth century to the loss of feeding habitat under intensified agriculture, and later recovery partly to land-use policies, particularly in Spain and eastern Europe.

Conservation includes protecting wetlands and moving unsafe rooftop nests. In Britain, the BTO notes that the last documented wild breeding before modern times was a pair on St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh in 1416. A reintroduction project at Knepp, Sussex, began in 2016; wild nesting followed in 2020, when two pairs bred, and the species is now classed as a reintroduced breeder.