What's Behind the Myth That Storks Deliver Babies?

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Special delivery!
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▼ Newborn babies are often depicted with a rather incongruous creature: a long-legged, sharp-beaked bird known as a stork. The image of this bird — usually 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 clothes 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 one spans the globe, appearing in folklore from Europe, the Americas, North Africa and the Middle East. The array of similar myths suggests that they all draw common inspiration from the birds' most noticeable features.
"The birds are big and white — linked to purity — and their nests are large, prominent and close to where people live. So, their good parenting behavior is highly evident," explained Rachel Warren Chadd, co-author of "Birds: Myth, Lore and Legend" (Bloomsbury Natural History, 2016).
Many popular accountstrace 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 childfrom Hera's clutches, and the Greeks depicted the transformed bird with a baby dangling from its beak.
But, when doing research for her book, Warren Chadd discovered that the original myth actually describes the baby-snatching bird as a crane, not a stork. "It can be difficult to verify that one species is associated with an ancient myth as, 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 world. But historically, that legendary creature was actually a heron: "A small 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 United Kingdom and editor of a research journal  about folklore and fairy tales, speculated that the link between storks and babies may boil down to this species confusion. "I think the connection of the stork with infants, particularly maternal care of children, is the result 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 young, he said. Somewhere along the way, storks may have become a substitute for this bird.
9-month migration
Whatever the origins of the myth, historians tend to agree that the idea of the baby-bringing stork was most firmly established in northern Europe, particularly Germany and Norway. During the Pagan era, which can be traced back at least to medieval times more than 600 years ago, it was common for couples to wed during the annual summer solstice, because summer was associated with fertility. At the same time, storks would commence their annual migration, flying all the way from Europe to Africa. The birds would then return the  following spring— exactly nine months later.
Storks "would migrate and then return to have their chicks in spring around the same time that a lot of babies were born," Warren Chadd said. Thus, storks became the heralds of new life, spawning the fanciful idea 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  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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Sin

Interesting indeed!

bsk

anyways, enjoyed the movie interesting post ..