Arrival week: late March mornings and the first storks on the loop

Stop 1

Gandrinės and the real dates

In Lithuania the twenty-fifth of March is Gandrinės, the stork day of the old calendar, when the storks are supposed to be back and the year to turn towards summer. Old sayings attach to the first stork you see: a flying one means a busy year, a standing one a lazy year, and so on through variations that change from village to village. The date is a good guess. On the loop, the first stork has turned up between the twenty-second of March and the second of April in every year of the register.

I count arrival as the first bird standing on a nest on the loop, not the first one seen flying over the city, which is usually a few days earlier and impossible to pin to a place. The dates, all at the first nest or within two of it, are below. Six springs are nowhere near enough for a trend, though I cannot help noting that the three earliest dates are also the three most recent, and I will be watching the first pole even more closely next March.

• 2021: 29 March, N01, a single bird in sleet
• 2022: 2 April, N03, at the end of a week of snow
• 2023: 27 March, N01
• 2024: 24 March, N01, the day after a thaw
• 2025: 25 March, N02
• 2026: 22 March, N01, the earliest yet

Stop 2

Males first, then the arguments

The first birds back are almost always males, and they go straight to a nest, usually the one they used the year before. White storks are faithful to nests rather than to partners, and a male standing on a pole in late March is waiting for whichever female claims the site, not necessarily last year's. For a week or two the loop is full of lone birds on nests, standing, preening, and clattering their bills with the head thrown right back whenever another stork flies over.

The females arrive over the following days, and this is when the fights happen. A good nest is worth fighting for, and a late male who finds his nest taken will try to take it back. I once watched two birds on the nest at N19 stabbing and wing-beating for the best part of an hour while a third stood on the next pole and waited. The register notes these things in a single line with a question mark, because from a car a hundred metres away it is not always obvious who won.

Stop 3

Snow on the nest

Late March in northern Lithuania is not reliably spring, and some years the storks fly straight into winter. In 2022 the first bird stood on a nest still white with the week's snow, and the fields around it stayed white for days afterwards. Storks can manage a few cold days on the reserves they carry, but a longer freeze makes feeding hard, and the birds turn up in odd places: beside farm manure heaps, on the rubbish tip, and along the few ditches that stay open.

Nobody should feed them. Storks cope with these spells more often than people fear, and the ones that do not usually had a problem before they arrived. What people in the villages do instead, and what I have come to admire, is leave them alone and phone someone qualified if a bird is clearly injured. I have never needed to do that on the loop, and in the register the cold springs show up mostly as late hatching and fewer chicks standing in June rather than as lost birds.

Stop 4

What they eat before the frogs

In the first weeks the storks' favourite food is still asleep. Frogs come out of the ditches and ponds in April, depending on the thaw, and until then the storks walk the fields for voles, earthworms and beetles. The best place to see them in arrival week is behind a tractor. The first ploughing and harrowing turn up worms and flush voles, and on one good morning on the Gruzdžiai side I counted seven storks walking in a loose line behind a single harrow, each keeping its distance from the next.

The wet meadows along the ditches are the other feeding ground, and the storks move to them as soon as the frogs start calling. From then on the loop becomes easier to predict. A pair that nests near wet meadows feeds close by and is back on the nest within minutes, while a pair on a water tower in the middle of dry fields may fly a kilometre or two each way. In the register, those are the nests that do worst in a cold, dry spring.

Stop 5

Laying, and the quiet weeks

By the end of April most pairs on the loop are sitting, and the nests go quiet. One adult lies flat in the cup, often invisible from the road except for a bill, while the other feeds or stands guard nearby. The two swap over several times a day. For about a month the only way to tell an occupied nest from an empty one is patience: ten minutes in the car at a respectful distance, and sooner or later a head comes up or the partner flies in with a stick.

These are the weeks when the register fills with the letters HPa and very little else, and when a nest that seemed occupied in April sometimes turns out to have been given up. They are also the weeks when I stop visiting so often. There is nothing to count until the chicks are big enough to show, and a car pulling up every other day beneath a sitting bird is not a kindness. The loop gets driven once a week in May and then left alone until June.