Based on an archival dataset from the 1958 White Stork census in Poland, we discuss, for the first time, people’s attitudes and beliefs related to storks in this large European country, situated in the centre of the species’ geographical range. The 1958 questionnaire was criticised for its excessive detail, a factor that could have been responsible for the ultimate fiasco of that year’s count [42]. As a result, all subsequent questionnaires were simplified and focused solely on questions regarding the abundance of storks. We show, however, that the detailed nature of the 1958 questionnaire, and especially its secondary aspects, revealed a wealth of information from several disciplines, which was never again obtained on such a scale, either in Poland or anywhere else within the stork’s distribution range. Moreover, when navigating this borderland between population ecology, nature conservation and ethnology, we were taking a wholly new approach to ethnographic data. We decided not to go into the minutiae of the beliefs described, as the variations could have been due to the respondents’ fertile imagination or their messages being misinterpreted. Instead, we invoked a universal typology of beliefs and attempted to quantify them in order to highlight those belief themes that were really relevant in rural Poland. These assumptions yielded a realistic picture of the human–nature relationship, with the result that this system can probably be applied anywhere in the stork’s distribution range and in different human cultures.

Our data confirm the universal affection for the stork in Poland in the mid-twentieth century. Positive attitudes towards storks were a hundred times more common than negative ones, and only 1% of respondents regarded storks as problematic. This result is hardly surprising, especially in light of the multifarious stork conservation projects in Poland and elsewhere in Europe [13], https://www.whitestorkproject.org. Formerly, however, it was far from obvious. The only comparative quantitative data available from Poland come from three pre-war provinces in the south of the country (Silesia, Kraków and Lwów (Lviv)), an area of 47 708 km2), where in 1933–35 a similar questionnaire survey was carried out [43,44,45]. There, too, attitudes towards storks were generally positive, though at a lower level than in the 1958 survey; far more frequent were neutral opinions, and locally there were cases where these birds were deliberately eradicated (Fig. 6). Wodzicki [43] deemed such a situation to be transitory, however, emerging as it did from unjustified suspicions that storks were responsible for substantial losses among game animals, as reported in the late-nineteenth-century German hunting literature. Our data from 1958 indicate a much warmer relationship with the stork, probably resulting from a greater environmental awareness, the introduction of legal protection for animals and the restricted access to firearms after World War II.

Comparison of attitudes towards storks in light of the nationwide survey of 1958 (in the present paper, mixed attitudes have been pooled with positive and negative ones) and from the 1930s, in three provinces of southern Poland (chi2 = 358.7, df = 2, P < .001)

It is not surprising either that utilitarian reasons for the affection or antipathy towards storks were dominant, that is, because they fed on animals, respectively, regarded as pests or useful ones. It is interesting, however, that these attitudes were often held for aesthetic reasons or as a result of superstitions. The latter arguments were put forward by people who, though ecologically illiterate, had very intimate practical relationships with nature. This confirms the existence of an aesthetic and spiritual affinity for nature among country folk. Such convictions were soon re-expressed in more formalized concepts of philosophical anthropology, like eco-aesthetics, biophilia or ecosophy [46, 47], but in the mid-twentieth century there were no empirical data available to support them. Most certainly, they stem from belief traditions more remote in time [48]. In nineteenth century landed estate records we read that country folk who mistreated a stork were employed on estates only with great reluctance, while in regions where stork densities were high, villages and farms not inhabited by storks were ostracized by their neighbours, for examples, when marriages were being arranged [13]. This exemplifies the positive effect of beliefs on the practical protection of storks, in the same way as the effect of traditional, negative myths regarding the eradication of wolves, ravens, owls or snakes [49, 50].

The questionnaires confirmed the diversity of beliefs widely held in rural Poland. All the types of belief, known from the anthropological and ethnographic literature, came to light, along with a multitude of variants which have served to enrich our knowledge of such beliefs. We obtained our new results by classifying them quantitatively. Interestingly, the beliefs were predominantly treated in an anthropocentric manner. As many as 97% of the beliefs related to three types—respect/reverence, prophesies and childbirth—which de facto are focused on human beings. The remaining 3% were related to the last type, i.e. stork behaviour, which were focused on these birds themselves. This implies that people protected storks, respected and/or revered them or even feared them, were happy to use them for making prophesies, but only secondarily bothered with impractical beliefs that describe the stork’s biology or its legendary human origins.

More specifically, the most widespread beliefs had to do with fire (lightning strikes). The stork was meant to protect people and their possessions from fire, or less commonly, it was said to cause fires. The predominance of this myth was no doubt due to the frequency with which fires used to break out in rural areas, a fact that is rarely remarked upon, urban conflagrations having then been far more spectacular (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_town_and_city_fires). With the crude means of heating rural houses and cottages and the inflammable materials, like thatch, used to build them, fires in country areas used to be a real hazard. The large dimensions of storks’ nests, exposed on the roofs of buildings, could have significantly increased the risk of a lightning strike; indeed, medieval codices of urban law prescribed the removal of storks’ nests from the roofs of tenement houses [51]. This is confirmed by contemporary figures on the causes of stork mortality in Poland: 3.1% of nestlings and 1.3% of fully-fledged birds perished as a result of lightning strikes [52]. Observations have also shown that lightning striking a stork’s nest does not always kill the birds, which will have further encouraged the development of myths and superstitions (Additional file 4: Appendix S1). The stork’s red legs and bill were identified with the causation of fire [16], whereas specific observations of stork parents sprinkling their nestlings with water during very hot weather [53] were associated with the farmhouse being protected against fire.

The sources of some prophetic beliefs are also to be found in actual observations of storks. The connection between the weather and the phenology of migration and breeding success has been empirically confirmed in a great many population studies of the White Stork [54]. This can be correlated with the analogous influence of the weather on crop yields in a given year, a frequent belief motif. Besides these realistic themes, there are also fantastic beliefs, relating to vengeance on farmers, the stork’s ability to foretell disasters or the fates of families being tied to the behaviour of the first storks seen in spring.

The greatest surprise was the low frequency of what is nowadays the commonest stork-related belief, that these birds bring babies. Although it has existed in different European cultures for a very long time [55, 56], this belief only became widespread in the nineteenth century, reaching the peak of popularity in the late twentieth century, no doubt as a result of its presence in advertising, pop-culture and media development. By contrast, the stork as a symbol of childbirth was mentioned a mere 58 times in the more than 2300 questionnaires from the 1958 survey. Perhaps this state of affairs is due to the ornithological nature of that survey and the open-endedness of the questions. By comparison, this belief was recorded as many as 126 times on 272 questionnaires filled out for the purposes of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas, these data having been gathered mainly in the 1980s (source: PEA archives).

We found no relationship between the sex of a teacher respondent and the responses relating to ABS. This may have been due to the credibility of the teachers, who objectively summarized what they could remember in this respect. Some of their responses were very likely based on interviews with their pupils, which obviously made the final result independent of the sex of the person signing the questionnaire. It is interesting to note that the proportions of men and women teachers signing the questionnaires were not equal: men did so twice as often as women. This would also suggest that in the Poland of those days it was men who formed the core body of teachers, in contrast to the present-day situation.

On the other hand, the results were evidently dependent on the abundance of storks. Beliefs were stated significantly more often in villages with more nests, which would suggest that the close proximity of storks and their constant contacts with people fostered their creation and dissemination. Less pronounced was the link between the numbers of storks and peoples’ attitudes. We had anticipated that larger numbers of storks might cause them to be regarded as troublesome neighbours [41]. Quite the contrary, in fact: larger numbers of storks did not lessen people’s affection for these birds; indeed, the more nests in a village, the more often were attitudes positive. Probably, the typical situation in Poland (from one to a few nests per village) was that stork numbers were below those that would make these birds irksome. Interestingly, positive attitudes were expressed more often in eastern Poland, which used to be regarded as economically backward and whose inhabitants did not include non-indigenous people. This stands in contrast to the more wealthy western parts of Poland, where a fair proportion of the populace were immigrants [39, 57]. This confirms the intimate relations that sedentary societies had with nature and throws light on the possible weakening of these relationships as these traditional communities became wealthier [4, 58]. In the case of the stork, relevant data will be needed to verify this.

Summarizing, the major results of this analysis include the documentation of the universal affection for the stork in the Poland of 1958, as well as the drawing up of the first taxonomy of stork-related beliefs and their quantification. A specific achievement is the revelation of forgotten questionnaires from the mid-twentieth century and the extraction of ethnographic data from ornithological materials. The ethnographic theme in them necessarily consisted of open-ended questions, which was actually an advantage. The information acquired revealed what people really thought about the stork in rural Poland. It turned out that beliefs, such as the one about storks being derived from humans, prettily embellished as tales in ethnographic works, were by no means widespread. Neither were beliefs then common that are popular nowadays, like the myth of storks bringing babies, which appeared quite late in the anthropological literature [59]. In fact, a highly practical rural reality emerged from these questionnaires. Villagers recognized the beauty of the stork, expressed the traditional association with this bird and protected it, but their stork-related beliefs contained mainly information that was useful to them in their everyday lives. In validating the above, the extensive empirical data from the centre of the stork’s distribution, analysed in this paper, may serve as a point of reference for similar studies in other parts of the stork’s range. The temporal aspect is also important: here we have shown the state of affairs prevailing in the mid-twentieth century. How these beliefs have subsequently evolved is an intriguing question. Their characteristics and frequency in contemporary rural Poland and Europe ought to be the subject of a new questionnaire or of similar surveys being carried out at the present time.