My new book, The Camino Compendium: A Historical and Cultural Exploration of the Camino de Santiago, is now available in bookstores far and wide. Amazon worldwide (including the US, of course) has the print and ebook formats; as of this moment, only the print version is available elsewhere (for example, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop in the US, Blackwell’s in the UK, Mighty Ape in Australia, and even Feltrinelli in Italy), but the ebook is coming to those vendors, too, in the not-too-distant future.
My hope for this book is that it fills a niche not yet covered in the many, many, many books written about the Camino Francés. If you want details, lots and lots of details, you grab a guidebook and/or Gitlitz and Davidson’s The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago. If you want pilgrim stories, you have your choice of maybe a thousand different memoirs. If you want to really understand some aspect of the history, like the Reconquista and its relationship to the Camino de Santiago, you can find a 300-400 page book on that subject.
But what if you want to read a really compelling story about something that has special relevance to what you just walked through, going into enough depth to be satisfying and illuminating, but without the commitment of a giant academic text? That’s where The Camino Compendium comes in! The book has 32 chapters, one devoted to each of the typical guidebook stages for the Camino Francés, exploring a completely different topic in each one. There are chapters on epic heroes like Roland and Cid, food and drink like Rioja wine and Astorgan chocolate, architectural highlights, and miracle stories, and all manner of other subjects.
Here’s one more sample chapter to give you a taste of what The Camino Compendium is all about. It was, admittedly, more challenging to identify some of the topics in the stages passing through the meseta. There just aren’t as many big sights in that stretch. As I struggled to land on this last topic, though, I realized that I was neglecting one of the most important, fundamental sights of the entire Camino–those amazing stork nests adorning the steeples of churches in this section. And that made me want to know more about the story behind their presence on the Camino. Behold!
Chapter 18: Calzadilla de los Hermanillos – Mansilla de las Mulas: Storks on Steeples
When I was a kid, I learned about storks from a most reputable source: cartoons. I was led to believe that these majestic birds were responsible for delivering babies to awaiting parents. As an adult, I discovered that this connection wasn’t just a comedic gimmick, but rather the persistence of a Greek myth–and a decidedly dark one at that. As Isabelle Gerretsen explains, the story there centers on cranes, which became conflated with storks over time (something that makes me feel better about my inability to distinguish between cranes and herons). Hera, awkwardly the wife and sister of Zeus, was among other things the goddess of childbirth. When she caught Gerana, the queen of the Pygmy folk, having an affair with Zeus, Hera transformed her into a crane. Gerana, however, had just given birth to a baby, and she was loath to lose her child, so she wrapped it in a blanket, picked up the package with her beak, and flew off.
In the 19th century, the narrative was repackaged as folktale by Hans Christian Andersen, in his story “The Storks.” The mechanics here are much more straightforward. Andersen writes that there is a “pond in which all the little children lie, waiting till the storks come to take them to their parents.” Lest this sound like a lovely vision, it must be added that the storks in the story conspire to wreak vengeance on a naughty little boy who had sung about hanging, frying, and shooting them. “There lies in the pond a little dead baby who has dreamed itself to death,” notes the mother stork to her aggrieved children. “We will take it to the naughty boy, and he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother.” Folks, don’t mess with storks.
In a more figurative sense, storks are also lifebringers, as they play a crucial role in dispersing seeds. Researchers found nearly 10,000 seedlings within close proximity to each white stork nest, mobilized by the storks’ transport of weeds and animal dung as nesting materials. Czarnecka and Kitowski have dubbed white storks “ecosystem engineers,” explaining that they “affect energy and matter flows in an ecosystem by creating or destroying living space, and thereby altering environments of other organisms.” As one example of that, white stork nests are cohabited by house sparrows, tree sparrows, starlings, kestrels, and grey wagtails. They also assist with human agriculture, as they prey upon species that cause significant damage to crops, including brown locusts, caterpillars, and the common vole.
The European white stork originates in the north, with many hailing from the Elbe River Biosphere Reserve. Traditionally, they have wintered in Africa, enjoying the warmer climate in places like Ethiopia, Senegal, and Nigeria. In between, they’ve followed one of two migratory trajectories, either heading southeastward through Turkey, or southwestward through France and Spain. To the joy of many pilgrims, including this one, this brings many storks to the Camino de Santiago, and their presence is felt most prominently in the meseta. It’s rare indeed to come across a church in these small towns without a long-established stork nest on its bell tower.
It could have been very different. The white stork was identified as an Annex I species by the European Union in 2009, which meant that it was “in danger of extinction, vulnerable, rare, or requiring particular attention.” And yet, today it has been labeled a “species of Least Concern.” It’s not that the officials decided to simply be unconcerned about the stork’s extermination. On the contrary, thank goodness, it’s because the bird has bounced back to a remarkable degree. Alejandro López-García and José Aguirre found that the 215 occupied nests in greater Madrid in 1984 had surged to 2,327 in 2021. Barbarin and colleagues found a similar story in Navarre, where their 2021 study documented 739 pairs, the highest number ever recorded in the region. A country-wide 2020 census found 36,217 storks in Spain overall, giving it the largest population in Europe, outside of Poland.
Two key changes drove this dramatic transformation. The first involves the placement of stork nests. Storks have long taken advantage of the built environment; there’s some indication that this originated as far back as the Neolithic era. It’s not that they won’t make use of trees or cliffs; a study conducted by Barbarin and colleagues in 2021 found that nearly half still established their nests in trees, and most notably the holm oak, cedar, ash, and fir. Rather, human structures, like churches, electrical pylons, chimneys, antenna towers, and street poles seemed equally acceptable, and in places they were rising in popularity. Two different studies, conducted by Tryjanowski et. al. and Vaitkuviene & Dagys found the same trend, with traditional structures abandoned in favor of manmade options.
One of the biggest advantages for storks and other birds living in urban environments is the “scarecrow effect,” which refers to the common phenomenon of nest predators being scared away by human activity in the area. The birds are impressively strategic, though, in how they approach these spaces, as Cem S. Kayatekin and colleagues have demonstrated in their study of Segovia, Spain. Nest placement isn’t random. First, stork nests avoid busy bus routes and major arterials. Second, they prioritize a more elevated position, relative to the surrounding area. It’s not about absolute height, but rather the adjacent buildings; on average, the researchers found that storks settled in nesting locations that were 12m higher than their surroundings. While this obviously allowed for improved surveillance, it also provided for an easy departure, no aggressive flapping required. Third, the structures need to be flat, or shallow-sloped, for reasons that are obvious enough–it makes the nest-building process much more straightforward. Finally, proximity to food matters. Interestingly, though, it’s less about distance and more about visual exposure; every stork nest in Segovia has unobstructed sight lines, linking them to nearby meadows or wetlands.
This leads quite naturally into the second change that has supported the stork resurgence. Recent decades have brought, in Barbarin’s words, “new, superabundant feeding sources” to storks in Spain. This includes the red swamp crayfish and an American crab species, which sounds pretty good. It also includes, perhaps even more prominently, landfills. Which… well, maybe it robs storks of some of their charm.
The importance of landfills to storks, though, can’t be overstated. In the Madrid area, storks were first documented to be engaging in dumpster-diving in the 1980s. Over the course of the next two decades, the birds committed to the lifestyle, abandoning traditional nesting sites in superior habitats in order to live closer to the dumps. The advantages of this were obvious. First and foremost, matters of taste aside, landfills guaranteed a consistent and predictable source of organic material. Not only did this result in better fed storks; it had a direct, positive impact on breeding. Foraging at landfills contributed to increases in the number of eggs laid by a bird in a single nesting, along with the size of those eggs. It also improved the odds of survival for those offspring.
For all that, though, the urbanization of Spain’s storks has its downsides. First, about those landfills. It turns out that a diet of garbage has its nutritional hazards. Studies are revealing increased rates of Escherichia coli and higher levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria, not to mention heavy metal concentration, raising concerns about potential public health consequences of this arrangement. In addition, while it certainly facilitates higher growth rates, it creates greater risk of juvenile storks consuming indigestible or otherwise hazardous items.
In addition, while there are fewer predators around man-built structures, there are plenty of human-related hazards. The use of pylons, in particular, for nesting has resulted in thousands of white storks being killed annually through collision with and electrocution by power lines–likely approaching a tenth of the total population. Along with that, the stork’s thin skull leaves its brain more vulnerable to radiation and microwaves. Balmori found that storks nesting within 200 meters of a cell phone station in Spain had lower levels of reproductive success than their peers.
A less life-and-death issue, but one that has special relevance to pilgrims, is that stork nests are heavy, and special effort has been made in recent years to remove stork nests from Spain’s older churches, especially when they are undergoing restoration. While these changes are offset with the introduction of artificial pole nests situated more closely to stork-friendly feeding areas, they come at the cost, of course, to a visual cherished by many on the Camino.
When I was a kid, the storks brought new life to humans. Today, humans have returned the favor, offering storks a new life of their own: sedentary, settling permanently atop man-built structures, with an all-they-can-eat buffet in close proximity. What will happen next? The European Landfill Directive has called for the gradual reduction of all open-air landfills within the EU. There are excellent environmental reasons to make this change, but the consequences for Spain’s burgeoning stork population will require further adaptation and accommodation.
Keep reading…
Alejandro López-García and José I. Aguirre, “White Storks nest at high densities near landfills changing stork nesting distributions in the last four decades in Central Spain,” Ornithological Applications
Alfonso Balmori, “Possible effects of electromagnetic fields from phone masts on a population of white stork,” Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine.
Isabelle Gerretsen, “How an ancient Greek myth still shapes our minds,” BBC
Cem S. Kayatekin, et. al., “The Relationship between the Built World and the Nesting Habits of the European White Stork: A Case Study of Segovia, Spain,” Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies
Joanna Czarnecka and Ignacy Kitowski, “The White Stork as an Engineering Species and Seed Dispersal Vector when Nesting in Poland,” Annales Botanici Fennici
Juan M. Barbarin, et. al., “Breeding population trends and recent changes in the nesting behaviour of the White Stork Ciconia ciconia L., 1758 in Navarre, north of Spain,” Munibe Ciencias Naturales
Mark C. Mainwaring, “The use of man-made structures as nesting sites by birds: A review of the costs and benefits,” Journal for Nature Conservation
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
