Black Stork at the Swimming Pond

On the walk down to the train station I pass the swimming pond. The pond is now frozen over and soon the ice will be thick enough to skate on. But on hot summer days it is full of locals enjoying the cool waters. This is not a swimming pool as we Brits know it. It is fed by water from the local brook and is a place for nature as well as humans. In the spring and autumn the water is sometimes disturbed by carp rising to the surface and returning to the depths or by flies breaking the surface as they take their first flights. Occasionally a heron patrols the shallows and for a while an enterprising fisherman had a boat moored at its side.

I remember how there used to swimming ponds in England like this one. There was a ruined one a few minutes walk from my Cotswold town, where the more adventurous kids used to swim even though it was silting up. The rest of us would cycle to Stanway, where there was still an open-air swimming pond, with wooden changing cubicles and mown grass on the water. These attractions have all gone, no doubt considered unsafe and unhealthy.

A year or so ago I was walking past the pond when I was amazed to see a black stork wading in the water. Whilst white storks are a common sight in villages and fields throughout the country, the black stork is an altogether rarer sight. The black stork is a shy bird, avoiding humans and restricted primarily to the forests and lakes. I suppose I should not have been as surprised as I was, after all my village borders the Boletice forest, which for many years was a restricted area. But still I had never seen a black stork at the pond or indeed anywhere else before, and I have not seen one since.