Four storks leave a museum roof in Nonsan, and a 55-year absence ends

On a roof tile structure above the Baekje Military Museum in Nonsan, a pair of Oriental white storks raised four chicks to fledging — the first stork breeding ever recorded in the city. Museum staff carried loaches to the nest and built a tower to lift the family beyond the reach of ground predators. Roughly 2,500 of these birds remain in the world.

Kwon Seon-hak, who leads the environmental group Eul Pureun Namu, confirmed at the start of September that all four had fledged. Museum staff had watched the nest since spring, fed the growing chicks loaches, and put up an elevated nest tower once it became clear the family would stay. A Daejeon MBC crew filmed the months of it for a programme they called A Naturalist's Stork Restoration Diary.

What makes the roof in Sinpung-ri worth the attention is where it is not. It is not a reserve. It is a public building with steady daytime foot traffic, on the southern edge of Nonsan, and the birds chose it themselves. Storks had first been seen in the area in February 2020. Six years later, a pair stayed.

Korea lost this bird once, precisely and traceably. In 1971 a wild breeding pair was located in Eumseong County; within days the male was shot. The widowed female laid only unfertilised eggs in captivity and died at Seoul Grand Park in September 1994, and with her the country's wild population ended. Restoration began two years later, when the Stork Restoration Research Center in Cheongju brought in four founder birds from Germany and Russia.

Nature responds to humans.

That was Suncheon's mayor, Noh Kwan-gyu, last November, after a wild and unbanded stork appeared at Suncheon Bay — about 200 km south, and shortly after the city had pulled utility poles out of the Anpung fields to widen the wintering ground for hooded cranes. The birds keep turning up where people have made room for them.

Yesan County, 55 km northwest of Nonsan, was picked as the release site in part for its old breeding records and its patchwork of rice paddies and low hills. The first captive-bred birds went out there in September 2015. Everything since — the pairs spreading province by province, the nest on the museum roof — descends from that release and from the four imported birds of 1996.

The species carries the name of a British naturalist's work: Robert Swinhoe described Ciconia boyciana in 1873 from a specimen collected near Yokohama. In Korea it is National Treasure No. 199, a designation that did not save the pair in Eumseong. What appears to be working now is less formal — a museum staff with a bucket of loaches, a county that removed some poles, a conservationist keeping count.

The four young birds are somewhere over the fields now. The nest tower stays where it is.