I drive the same loop of district roads around Šiauliai every spring and summer and write down every stork nest on it, occupied or not, so that one year can be laid honestly beside the next.

This is a register first and a diary second. It began in 2021 with a list written on the back of a fuel receipt: nineteen nests I passed on the way to and from a job west of the city, nests I had driven past for years without counting. By the end of that summer the list had forty-one occupied nests on it, a loop of roads to hold them together, and a notebook of its own that now lives in the car door.

The loop leaves Šiauliai on the Kuršėnai road, turns north on the smaller roads through the farmland towards Gruzdžiai, and comes back into the city down the Riga road, about seventy kilometres with the detours. Most of the nests are on concrete electricity poles, a good number sit on the steel water towers left over from the collective farms, and a few are on chimneys, barn roofs and dead trees. A shorter southern loop through Kurtuvėnai gets driven when there is time.

I am not an ornithologist, and I do not climb, ring or handle anything. Every count here is made from the car or a field track with binoculars and, for the higher nests, a small spotting scope. I use the codes of the international stork census so that my numbers mean what other people's mean, and an unsure count is recorded as unsure. The exact places of the nests are kept in the register and nowhere else, which is deliberate.