Fact or Fiction

Do you remember the scene from the Walt Disney film Dumbo when the storks are flying in the baby animals to the circus train? Other cartoons often showed the same scenario with human infants. For years I would hear adults joke around about the storks bringing babies. I just figured that's where the animator's got the idea for a tall gangly bird to fly babies to their mothers.

Recently, I read the December 2013 Jewish Jewels newsletter. They included an interesting fact about storks. (They're in the Bible several times.) Storks pass through Israel on their way from Europe to Africa and then back again in the spring when the weather warms up.

Their tour guide, Hanna Ben Haim, told them that many children in European countries were conceived after the harvest was completed, which placed the time of the births around the return of the storks. This became the root of the old wives tale of the storks bringing the babies to their homes. My dad always did say there was an ounce of truth in every old wives' tale.

I have to embarrassingly admit that until I traveled to Romania I thought the stork as portrayed in cartoons was a fictitious idea of animators. My basis for this was the roadrunner from cartoons. Having lived in Texas for several years the only roadrunners I ever saw were short. I figured animators had lengthened the legs of the roadrunner as well as storks for the purpose of a story. I had no reason to think the animals were portrayed in true nature.

Of course I knew long legged birds such as flamingos and cranes existed. But up to that point I'd never seen a roadrunner or a stork in a zoo. And I didn't have the desire to do any research that might correct my distorted thinking. I know that sounds archaic and severely lacking in knowledge but remember this was before the internet age of instant information. Back then it took time to find the right encyclopedia or magazine in the library. . .I had other teenage things to do.

But when I traveled through the Hungarian and Romanian countryside as an adult, I experienced an educational moment. Sitting atop many of the houses and buildings were these giant nests. And inside the nests where huge birds. Only when they took off from the nests did our bus load of people realize just how big a stork truly is. Turns out the animators had done a wonderful job of depicting a stork flying babies to mothers.

Oh, and by the way, most information I've found on roadrunners only shows a short-legged variety. But I'm here to say that a long-legged variety, just like in the cartoons, is alive and well and living in my area. The little rascal tried to eat some of the baby barn swallows around my house a couple of years ago.