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In culture

Many ancient mythologies feature stories and legends involving storks. In Ancient Egypt, saddle-billed storks were seen as being amongst the most powerful animals and were used to represent the ba, the Ancient Egyptian conception of the soul, during the Old Kingdom. Bennu, an Egyptian deity that was later the inspiration for the phoenix, may also have been inspired by a stork, although it was more likely an ibis or heron.

Greek and Roman mythology portrays storks as models of parental devotion. The 3rd century Roman writer Aelian, citing the authority of Alexander of Myndus, noted in his De natura animalium (book 3, chapter 23) that aged storks flew away to oceanic islands where they were transformed into humans as a reward for their piety towards their parents. Storks were also thought to care for their aged parents, feeding them and even transporting them, and children's books depicted them as a model of filial values. A Greek law called Pelargonia, from the Ancient Greek word pelargos for stork, required citizens to take care of their aged parents. The Greeks also held that killing a stork could be punished with death.

Storks feature in several of Aesop's Fables, most notably in The Farmer and the Stork, The Fox and the Stork, and The Frogs Who Desired a King. The first fable involves a stork who is caught with a group of cranes who are eating grain in a farmer's field, with the moral that those who associate with wicked people can be held accountable for their crimes. The Fox and the Stork involves a fox who invites a stork for dinner and provides soup in a dish that the stork cannot drink from, and is in turn invited for dinner by the stork and given food in a narrow jug which he cannot access. It cautions readers to follow the principle of do no harm. The third fable involves a group of frogs that are dissatisfied with the king that Zeus has given them, an inanimate log, and who are then punished with a new King Stork (a water-snake in some versions) who eats the frogs. King Stork has subsequently entered the English language as a term for a particularly tyrannical ruler.