Qualla: Stork Farm Loburg

Stork Farm Loburg: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muggmag, Public domain. Between fifty and seventy of them arrive every year, and most arrive badly. A bird that hit a power line. A chick blown out of a nest in a summer storm. A clutch of eggs left cold because the adults never came back. They all end up on the same three hectares at the edge of Loburg, a town of about two thousand people in Jerichower Land, where one family started taking in broken storks in 1979 and never stopped. Something close to two thousand white storks have passed through since, along with more than seven hundred birds of prey. About two in three go back to the sky. The rest are the reason the place looks the way it does.

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Image: Muggmag | Public domain

Stork Farm Loburg: The Man Who Counted Nests

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Catatine, CC BY-SA 4.0. Christoph Kaatz was an ornithologist who lived in Loburg and spent his working life on a single bird. He counted the local white stork population and tracked whether it was holding. He built nesting platforms. He banded birds so that somebody, somewhere down the flyway, might rea...

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Image: Catatine | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stork Farm Loburg: A Garden, a District, a Ministry, a Club

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Catatine, CC BY-SA 4.0. Few small institutions have changed hands so often without changing address. It began as a family's back garden. In 1988 the culture department of Bezirk Magdeburg — an administrative district of East Germany — took the stork farm over and placed it under the control of the town ...

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Image: Catatine | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stork Farm Loburg: Reading the Map a Bird Draws

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dguendel, CC BY 3.0. Wild storks from Loburg carry satellite transmitters, and the tags do something a leg ring never could: they draw the whole migration, day by day, instead of producing a single dot when a dead bird turns up in a foreign field. The best known of them was a white stork called Prinz...

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Image: Dguendel | CC BY 3.0

Stork Farm Loburg: The Ones Who Stay

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Not every bird recovers enough to be released. A stork with a wing that will not carry it cannot be sent off to cross the Bosphorus, and those birds are housed at Loburg permanently. They are the residents visitors actually meet — close, unbothered, standing about on legs like re...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Stork Farm Loburg: Seven Years on a Restaurant

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User MOdmate on de.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2016 the association bought a former restaurant nearby, along with the house attached to it, and set about turning the dining room into an environmental education centre. With subsidies and a great deal of patience, the work took seven years. It opened to the public in May 202...

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Image: User MOdmate on de.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0