Country chapel, Perelejo, Near Madrid.
How do the storks do it?! They build these vast nests out of straight sticks on the highest, most exposed spots, and no matter how hard the wind blows, they never seem to come down, even from a sloping chapel roof!
We think we humans are clever, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do that!
Sitting up there against the blue sky, their song is an extraordinary click-clacking as they rattle their bills. Occasionally they’ll soar off high above the fields and villages into the complete peace above.
I spent twenty minutes with them, hiding inside the car to draw, with a bitter January wind whipping around outside.
Notes from Ben 
Nice drawing!
I was amazed last year to see so many Storks (watch the spelling!) in the middle of Salamanca nesting and parading on the wonderful old buildings there.
And it’s good to see Spain encourages storks to reproduce by providing high metal structures for nest building.
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Thanks Jane, for the comment and for pointing out the spelling error! Yes, it’s wonderful to see that they are so well looked after. It must be because the Spanish believe that babies arrives in the mouths of storks that fly in from Paris!!
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I didn’t know Spanish children were delivered all the way from Paris :P. But yes, I spent a week in a little village between Avila and Segovia, and you could watch the storks flying back and forth and lots of them seemend to live in the ruins of an old castle in the village. I thought that was really amazing.
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Apparently it’s not just the Spanish that thank the storks for the babies:
“According to European folklore, the stork is responsible for bringing babies to new parents. The legend is very ancient, but was popularised by a 19th-century Hans Christian Andersen story called The Storks. German folklore held that storks found babies in caves or marshes and brought them to households in a basket on their backs or held in their beaks. These caves contained adebarsteine or “stork stones”. The babies would then be given to the mother or dropped down the chimney. Households would notify when they wanted children by placing sweets for the stork on the window sill. From there the folklore has spread around the world to countries such as the Philippines and South America. Birthmarks on the back of the head of newborn baby, nevus flammeus nuchae, are sometimes referred to as stork-bite.”
(An excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stork#Storks_and_childbirth)
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