Stork veneration

Across Europe, the white stork has been a protected and lucky bird. It nests on rooftops and chimneys and returns faithfully each spring. It brings babies, guards the house it nests on, and harming it invites misfortune: lightning, fire, or the death of a child. The taboo was strong enough that storks went unhunted in regions where almost every other bird was fair game.

In southern Italy storks were mostly birds of passage, seen on migration rather than nesting. By the twentieth century Italy had very few breeding pairs; reintroduction projects only rebuilt the population from the 1980s. A village that ate its storks’ young in the famine of 1943–44 had broken one of the oldest and most widely shared animal taboos in Europe.