Dresden Enterprise And Sharon Tribune

STORK'S VISIT TO SCOTLAND

Record of Bird's Appearance in 1416 May Be Found in Chronicles of the Country.

The white stork of the continent of Europe, which is encouraged in most, and even protected in some, of the countries to which it resorts to breed, and round which much story and legend have gathered, has been known for centuries to be an occasional visitor to the British isles, chiefly to Norfolk, but very rarely to Scotland, though it has never been known to nest or even attempt to do so in Britain.

However, a record of its having nested in Scotland, appears in Goodall's edition of the "Scotichronicon."

This work was begun by John Fordun, who died about 1384, and was continued by Walter Bower, the abbot of Inchcolm. It is in Bower's chronicles for 1416 that the story appears.

The translation runs thus:

"In the year of our Lord, fourteen hundred and sixteen, there died on the morrow of the birth of St. John the Baptist, Master James Biset, prior of St. Andrew's. In this same year, a pair of storks came to Scotland and nested on top of the church of St. Giles of Edinburgh and dwelt there throughout a season of the year; but to what place they flew away thereafter no one knows."

Commenting on this, Lord Lilford Clarke says: "The church of St. Giles, on which the storks nested, was a new stone edifice commenced in 1387, to replace a former church destroyed in 1385, and some of it doubtless forms part of the cathedral of today."