Storks And The Delivery Of Babies

A similar connection between storks and birth exists in Egyptian mythology. The ancient deity Bennu, often represented as a stork, was said to have flown over the primeval waters of Nun before creation. When Bennu landed on a rock and let out a cry, it determined what would be included in the unfolding world.

However, more recent research suggests that Gerena was actually transformed into a crane rather than a stork, and archaeological evidence indicates that Bennu was likely inspired by a now-extinct species of large heron that once lived on the Arabian Peninsula.

Another bird that may have been confused with the stork, and which contributed to the idea of storks as bringers of life, is the pelican. In Catholic symbolism, the image of a mother pelican feeding her chicks is deeply symbolic.

Pelicans in the Northumberland Bestiary

According to legend, a brood of young pelicans, despite being lovingly cared for, became increasingly aggressive toward their mother, pecking at her and wounding her. In a fit of anger, she struck out with her sharp beak, killing them. Three days later, overcome with remorse, she pierced her own breast, drawing blood that dripped onto her chicks, miraculously reviving them while she perished, an ultimate act of sacrifice.

This depiction of a pelican piercing her breast to save her young, is known as The Pelican in Her Piety, and appears in illuminated manuscripts, jewellery, stained glass windows, and paintings, and was even referenced by Shakespeare.

To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms
And, like the kind life-rend’ring pelican,
Repast them with my blood.

Hamlet 4.5.167-169

Another theory that further connects pelicans and storks was put forward by Paul Quinn, a professor of English literature at the University of Chichester. He suggested that people who observed pelicans in flight may have mistaken them for storks carrying objects in their beaks. Given the existing association between storks and new life, they may have assumed that the birds were carrying babies.

The migratory habits of storks may have also played a role in shaping the myth. In Pagan times, it was traditional for couples to marry on the Summer Solstice, a day symbolising the sun, fertility, and prosperity.

Around the same time, storks would begin their annual migration to Africa for the winter, returning to northern Europe nine months later, just as many newlyweds were giving birth to their honeymoon babies. This coincidence may have further cemented the idea that storks were responsible for delivering newborns.

Folklore & fairy tales

By the Medieval era, the folklore of storks delivering babies was widespread across northern Europe, particularly in Germany. According to legend, the souls of unborn children resided in caves, marshes, and ponds, embodied in mystical Adeborsteine, or “stork-stones.” Storks were believed to retrieve these souls and deliver them to expectant parents, either handing them directly to the mother or dropping them down the chimney. The manner of delivery depended on the child’s temperament; well-behaved babies rode in a basket on the stork’s back, while naughty ones were carried in its beak.

Children hoping for a baby sibling would try to attract a stork’s favour by singing songs or leaving sweets on the windowsill, believing that these gestures would encourage the bird to bring them a new brother or sister.

In the 19th century, Hans Christian Andersen popularised the stork legend with a dark and unsettling twist in his tale The Storks. In the story, four young storks are mocked by a group of boys who taunt them with a cruel rhyme about hanging, burning, cooking, and drowning storks. One boy, Peter, refuses to join in, but the others continue singing:

“Stork, stork, fly away,
Stand not on one leg, I pray,
See your wife is in her nest,
With her little ones at rest.
They will hang one,
And fry another;
They will shoot a third,
And roast his brother.”

As the storks grow older, they long for revenge. Their mother dissuades them from pecking out the boys’ eyes but offers another form of justice. She leads them to the pool where the unborn babies lie. The kind-hearted Peter, who refused to sing the cruel song, is rewarded with both a baby brother and sister. The boys who had remained silent receive one sibling each. However, the boy who led the mocking chant is punished and his family is delivered a dead baby. As an extra honour, the mother stork declares that from then on, all her sons will be named Peter.

By the 1930s, the stork myth had firmly overtaken an earlier explanation of childbirth, that babies were found under the gooseberry bush. This euphemism, once common in the 19th century, was actually a euphemism for female pubic hair, making the stork story a far more palatable alternative for explaining the mysteries of birth to young children.

The theory of the stork

Most people take it for granted that human babies are the result of sexual reproduction. However, some scientists have proposed an alternative theory – not as a serious claim, but as a way to illustrate the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation. This is known as the Theory of the Stork.

The origins of the idea are unclear, though some attribute it to the English statistician George Udny Yule (1871–1951) and author of the influential textbook Introduction to the Theory of Statistics.

Yule apparently noted that in Alsace villages, the number of newborn babies correlated with the number of nesting storks. He then supposedly used this example to show how one could mistakenly conclude that storks actually deliver babies, when in reality, the explanation is far simpler: larger villages have more houses, which provide more rooftops for stork nests, and they also contain more families, leading to more births. In this case, village size is the confounding factor.

However, there is little concrete evidence that Yule ever proposed this idea. The earliest mention of it appears to come from Polish mathematician Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981), who referenced the story in a research paper published in 1952, suggesting it may be apocryphal.

In 2000, British physicist and science writer Professor Robert Matthews conducted a statistical analysis of birth rates and stork populations across Europe while at Aston University.

His paper,  Storks Deliver Babies (p = 0.008), referenced the p-value, a statistical measure indicating the likelihood that an observed result is due to chance. In scientific research, a p-value of less than 0.05 is considered statistically significant, and Matthews’ findings suggested a correlation between stork populations and birth rates in the 17 countries he studied as shown in the chart below.

However, an important piece of data was missing: land area. Just as larger villages tend to have more storks and more babies, larger countries also tend to follow the same pattern. Once land area was accounted for, the apparent correlation disappeared.

Another well-known example came in 2008, when Dr Thomas Höfer of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment published  New evidence for the Theory of the Stork. He observed a correlation between the decline of stork populations in the German state of Lower Saxony during the 1970s and 80s and a decrease in birth rates. He also found a significant correlation between an increase in the stork population in Berlin and a rise in out-of-hospital births.