Four feet high, with jet black wings and bright red beak and legs (Zechariah 5:9). Chacidah, the white stork, Ciconia, alba, unclean because of its unclean feeding (Leviticus 11:19). From Hebrew chacid, "dutiful," "piously affectionate." The black stork is more common in the East (but Septuagint translated "heron".) Its confiding nature toward man, its utility in clearing away offal and reptiles, its attachment to its young, and kindness to the old and feeble, its grave contemplative look, and its predilection for pinnacles of temples, mosques, and churches, have made it in all ages an object of man's special regard and protection; so that in Thessaly it was a capital crime to kill a stork (Pliny, H. N. 10:21).
        In the burning of Delft formerly, and more lately in the battle of Friedland, a mother stork, having vainly tried to extricate her young, perished in the flames herself. The stork punctually observes "her appointed times" of migration at the end of March and beginning of April; in Holland she remains until October. Storks' nests, unless disturbed, are rebuilt for generations on the same site (Jeremiah 8:7). Regularly they return every spring from their winter abodes in sunnier climes, but God's people will not return to Him even when "the winter" of His wrath is past and He invites them back to "the spring" of His favor. They build their large nests in lofty trees, in the absence of lofty towers and ruins, to which their liking for man's society attracts them (Psalm 104:17). (On Job 39:13, sSee OSTRICH.)