London gets ready to welcome the storks home after 600 years
Look up, London. After roughly six hundred years away, the white stork is coming home. These are grand birds, tall and graceful, with wings that seem to stretch on forever. They vanished from Britain in the Middle Ages, but this autumn a new flock will settle into a purpose built home at Eastbrookend Country Park in Dagenham. Their chicks will grow up safe there, and in time take to the wild to raise families of their own. It is the same gentle, patient approach that already worked at the Knepp estate in Sussex, where storks hatched in the wild in 2020 for the first time in centuries.
The storks are only the beginning. Their return is part of a bright plan to bring nature back into the heart of the city, with nearly half a million pounds behind it from the Mayor of London's Green Roots Fund, the local council and the London Wildlife Trust. Beavers are on their way back to the same corner of east London too. Picture it: a child in Dagenham looking up to see a stork wheeling over the rooftops, a sight their great great grandparents would have known by heart. A little piece of the wild, coming home.