and here is southey reporting on a stork

thanks publicdomainpictures.net

In the last post I shared Robert Southey's letter home from Leyden, at the end of which he takes care to check on the family cats.  Most of that letter describes the friendship between his host's son, Lodowijk, and a young stork that fetched up in the family garden:
* * *
. . . I must tell you about his stork. You should know that there are a great many storks in this country and that it is thought a very wicked thing to hurt them. They make their nests, which are as large as a great clothes basket, upon the houses and churches, and frequently, when a house or church is built, a wooden frame is made on the top for the storks to build in. Out of one of these nests a young stork had fallen and somebody wishing to keep him in a garden cut one of his wings. The stork tried to fly, but fell in Mr. Bilderdijk's garden and was found there one morning almost dead; his legs and his bill had lost their color and were grown pale, and he would have died if Mrs. Bilderdijk, who is kind to everybody and everything, had not taken care of him. . . . She gave him food and he recovered. The first night they put him in sort of a summerhouse in the garden, which I cannot describe to you for I have not been there myself; the second night he walked to the door himself that it might be opened to him. He was very fond of Lodowijk and Lodowijk was as fond of his "oyevaar" (which is the name for stork in Dutch, though I am not sure that I have spelled it right) and they used to play together in such a manner that his father says it was a pleasure to see them; for a stork is a large bird, tall and upright, almost as tall as you are or quite. The oyevaar was a bad gardener; he ate snails, but with his great broad foot he did a great deal of mischief, and destroyed all the strawberries and many of the vegetables. But Mr. and Mrs. Bilderdijk did not mind this because theoyevaar loved Lodowijk and therefore they loved the oyevaar, and sometimes they used to send a mile out of town to buy eels for him when none could be had in Leyden.

-- Colson, Elizabeth. Children's Letters: a Collection of Letters Written to Children by Famous Men And Women. New York: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1905. pp. 64-5.