Storks, Whales

Of all the birds of heaven, none is more moral than the stork. Monogamy is his rule and practice. Year in and year out he cleaves to the original wife of his pouted bosom, rearing family after family with her in their first and only love-nest on some Dutchman's rooftree or in the cornice of a South European villa. So faithful and contented is the admirable stork, indeed, that he was long ago judged fit to represent the mysterious agency that brings the patter of tiny feet to human abodes. Pet storks are commonly named "Cato," after the eminent Stoic.

But not until last week were ornithologists particularly conscious of a truly extraordinary feature of stork ethics that is familiar folklore among European peasants. Storks enforce their code of sex morality by vigilant communal action. Ornithologist Annie France-Harar arrived in Berlin from a stork-studying trip to Greece and described the actual execution of a stork adulteress by 50 of her incensed neighbors. They met in the air over her nest, where she sat trembling with full knowledge of her sin and the penalty. Down they swooped upon her, their plunging, hacking bills soon rending her wicked body to bits. Miss France-Harar's colleague, one Surgeon Orthman, vouched for her story, adding that he had seen three such executions within the year, in each case upon a female stork, giving rise to the assumption that a double standard prevails, unfaithful stork husbands--if there be any such-- going scot free.

Scientists wish they knew more about the family life of the whale. So retiring is the creature that none can say surely if he takes a single wife or a seraglio. Englishmen sailed lately from Hull for the South Atlantic to find out, by peering and prying and firing identification tags into whales found together. If polygamous, male whales will be rewarded with protection that their kind may increase and multiply.