Stork Season

Like the Canada Geese returning to crap all over Greeley for another year, except somehow better (maybe because the don't crap in Riga's parks), the storks have returned to Latvia.

All year round, one can see stork nests dotting the countryside. As I have heard it, it is illegal to damage or knock down a stork nest. And apparently, Storks love nothing more than putting their nests on top of telephone poles. Perhaps more accurately, they loved to put their nests on telephone poles thirty years ago. As progress put up new, somehow better telephone poles and knocked down the old ones, progress was prevented from knocking down those poles with stork nests. As a result, there are random, lonely poles along the roadsides all over Latvia, solitarily holding up storks' nests.

On a recent trip to the East of Latvia, this nest was spotted with a pair of storks apparently mating. Violently. They kept falling out of the nest, and then would fly off in a big circle and land back in the nest and wrestle some more and then fall out again. Eventually they fell out and I guess they were done because they just sat there on the ground. Maybe if they didn't put the nest on the top of a telephone pole, it would be a little easier.

P.s. Sorry we messed up some of the pictures earlier this week. They're fixed now if you want to go back and look.