Platforms, water towers and the last storks of August

Stop 1

Poles, towers, chimneys and trees

Of the forty-seven sites on the loop, thirty are on concrete electricity poles, nine on the old steel water towers, four on chimneys or the roofs of farm buildings, three in trees and one on a pole put up for the purpose in a meadow. That mix is typical of this part of Lithuania, where storks moved from roofs and old trees onto poles and towers as those spread across the countryside, and have stayed there because the view is good and the height keeps them safe from anything on four legs.

The water towers are my favourites. They are the tall steel tanks on a single thin leg that stood on every collective farm, most of them long out of use, and nearly every one still standing on the loop carries a nest on top. A nest up there looks out over kilometres of flat fields, nothing can reach it, and the pairs that hold these nests are among the most reliable in the register. They are also the hardest to count, and the most likely to disappear when a farm finally decides to cut its tower down.

Stop 2

What a platform does

A stork nest on top of a live electricity pole is a problem for everybody. Wet nest material hanging over the wires causes short circuits, and a stork landing between two wires can be killed outright. The answer used across the country is a metal platform fixed to the top of the pole, which lifts the nest well clear of the wires. On the loop, most of the pole nests now sit on platforms, and several were moved up from the bare pole top onto a new platform during the years I have been counting.

The moves are done outside the breeding season, while the birds are away, and the old nest material is usually lifted onto the new platform so the returning pair finds something familiar. In the register a move shows as a note beside the number and, the following spring, nearly always the same code as before. Only one moved nest on the loop, N11, stood empty the year after the move, and a pair was back on it the year after that, as if it had simply needed a season to think.

Stop 3

The nest that fell

Stork nests grow every year. The pair adds new sticks each spring, and the older layers pack down into something closer to a stack of turf than a heap of twigs. A nest in use for a few decades can weigh as much as a small car. In August 2024 the nest at N33, on a leaning pole beside a farm track on the Gruzdžiai side, came down in a thunderstorm after the young had left, taking the top of the pole with it. The next morning there was a mound of sticks and earth in the ditch the size of a haystack.

The pole was replaced that autumn with a new one carrying a platform, and in the spring of 2025 a pair arrived, stood on the empty platform for two days, and then began carrying sticks. By the end of April they had a shallow nest, and that summer they raised two young in it. The register still calls it N33, because the site did not move, though the note I wrote beside it that year is mostly exclamation marks and would not stand up to much scrutiny.

Stop 4

Gathering in the stubble

From the middle of July the chicks start flying, first in short hops from the nest to the next pole, then in wide circles over the fields. By early August the young spend most of the day away from the nest, and families join others in the stubble fields and freshly mown meadows. The biggest gatherings on the loop form on the Riga road side, where the fields are largest, and in some years I have counted more than sixty storks walking one stubble field behind a combine, snapping up whatever it disturbs.

The young leave first. They set off in the second half of August without their parents, on the same route south-east towards the Bosporus that storks from this part of Europe have taken for as long as anyone has watched, and on into Africa. The adults follow a week or two later. For the register this means the nests empty from the young upwards, and the last stork of the year on the loop is almost always an adult, standing alone on its nest in the evening.

Stop 5

Empty nests

The last date goes into the register the same way as the first, as the last bird seen standing on a nest on the loop. The dates cluster tightly around the end of August, with one straggler in 2024 that stood on the water tower at N27 for four days after everything else had gone. I drove past it every evening that week, half expecting it to stay for the winter, which storks here very occasionally try and rarely survive. On the fifth evening the tower was empty.

Through the autumn and winter the nests stand empty on their poles, collecting snow, and I drive the loop once in October and once in February to check that every one of them is still there. The register shows no gaps in those months, only a list of numbers with a tick beside each. In the second week of March the notebook comes out of the drawer again, and I start watching the first pole after the roundabout on the way to work.

• 2021: 28 August, N01
• 2022: 2 September, N27
• 2023: 30 August, N04
• 2024: 5 September, N27, a single adult that stayed four extra days
• 2025: 31 August, N19
• 2026: 29 August, N02