The loop and the register: how I count stork nests north of Šiauliai

Stop 1

Seventy kilometres, one direction

The loop starts at the roundabout on the Kuršėnai road and always runs the same way round: west first, then north on the smaller roads through the farmland towards Gruzdžiai, then east, and back into Šiauliai down the Riga road past Meškuičiai. With the detours up farm lanes to reach the towers it comes to about seventy kilometres and takes a little under three hours at counting speed. I drive it clockwise every time. That sounds fussy, but it means each nest is seen at roughly the same hour on every visit, with the same light on it.

The hour matters more than I expected. In the morning the sun is behind me on the western stretch and the nests ahead are lit from the front; in the afternoon the same nests are black shapes against the glare and a chick can hide behind an adult without trying. Storks also move about. Around midday in June one adult is usually away feeding, and the other may be standing on the rim, lying flat, or off to a ditch as well.

Stop 2

Numbering the nests

Every nest site on the loop has a number, painted on nothing and written only in the register: N01 at the first pole after the roundabout, up to N47 at a farm chimney on the Riga road just before the city limit. A new nest gets the next free number, even if it sits between two old ones, so the numbers stopped running in road order in the second year. Beside each number the register notes the kind of support, the nearest village, a short description anyone could follow, and the kilometre reading on the trip meter.

Numbers stay with the site, not with the sticks. When a pole nest is moved onto a new platform a few metres away it keeps its number, with a note. When a water tower is demolished and the storks move to a pole across the road, that is a new number, and the old one is marked as lost. The rule has made the register a little untidy, but it keeps one thing clear: how many places storks could have used on the loop in a given year, and how many of those they did use.

Stop 3

The census codes

I borrowed the codes from the international white stork census, held every ten years across the whole range of the species, because they were designed for exactly this job and people who count storks already understand them. They come from German, which is why the letters look odd in English. Each nest gets one code per season, based on everything seen on every visit, and each nest with young gets a number for the young standing in it at the late June count.

The code most people get wrong at first, including me, is HPo. A pair that holds the nest through April and May and has nothing standing in it by July is not an empty nest, and it is not a failure of the count. It is one of the most useful things the register records, because in a bad year the HPo column fills up long before the headline number of occupied nests changes at all, and it is the first place I look when a season feels wrong.

• HPa: a pair holding the nest for the season, whatever happens next
• HPm: a pair that raised at least one young to near fledging
• HPo: a pair that held the nest but raised no young
• HE: a single stork holding the nest for much of the season
• HO: a nest standing empty all year
• JZG: the total of young counted across all nests

Stop 4

Five seasons of numbers

Across the loop the register now holds forty-seven sites. The number of occupied nests has moved within a narrow band, from forty-one in 2021 to forty-five in 2025, while the number of young has swung much more widely: ninety-five in the best year, 2024, and sixty-four in 2023, when a week of cold rain in the middle of June killed chicks in nest after nest. That contrast is the main thing the register has taught me. Storks come back to almost all the nests almost every year, and June decides what they get from them.

Five seasons is a short run for a bird that can live twenty years or more, and forty-seven nests along one loop of roads are a tiny corner of a country with one of the densest stork populations in Europe. I do not pretend the register says anything about storks in Lithuania as a whole. What it does is let one person, driving one loop in the same order every spring, notice when something changes, and write it down while it is still fresh.

Stop 5

What I carry

The kit is modest. A pair of ten-power binoculars does most of the work, and a small spotting scope on a window clamp handles the water towers, where the nest sits twenty metres up and the chicks show only as a row of bills above the rim. The register itself is a paper notebook with the loop drawn on the inside cover, and a pencil, because pens give up in a car in March. The trip meter does the rest.

What the kit does not include is anything that goes nearer the nest than the road. I do not use a drone, I do not climb, and I do not walk up to poles in fields. Storks in this part of Lithuania are used to cars, tractors and people in farmyards, but a stranger standing under the nest is something else, and a bird that leaves its eggs in a cold April wind to watch that stranger is paying a price for somebody else's curiosity.