1/4 One of the boy in the garden of Frans (photo: Frans van den Heuvel).
A baby boom on storks in Aarle-Rixtel: four were born in a short time and against all expectations. The area is not known as a place where storks occur. One young was born in a nest in a new nature reserve and three youngsters are in the garden of Groenteboer Frans van den Heuvel, a little further. The nest has remained empty for five years.
“Last year I got a plastic stork with my birthday, because my friends thought it was so pathetic that I have never had a stork,” says Frans van den Heuvel. “I have it close to the nest. Maybe that has an attraction.”
An IVN Nature Education employee had once viewed the post. “He said,” Da isn’t going to be.
But at the beginning of April a suddenly a stork couple came to sit on the post. “On Sunday morning I got apps. In the neighborhood they saw the storks busy. Since Friday the male stood there like a Waker. I have climbed the roof to take a picture.”
Frans saw three young storks. “This is KEI skon. If you zoom in you will see two stork on the right and on the left there is 1 with a mouth open, “he says about the photo.
The pole with the Ooievaarsnest came there when Frans also started a care farm. It is an eye -catcher in his large garden. Every day there are twenty elderly people with a need for care. “They love it totally. We have been eating rusks with mice all week.”
In the new nature reserve ‘t Gulden Land, no stork would certainly come, it was thought. It was therefore a joke to put a tree the other way around. “The tree had to get out and then it seemed like a stork nest,” says project leader Nikki Barten. “The area is not set up on storks. It looked very nice. That was the idea.”
At the beginning of April was the opening of the redeveloped nature reserve. “There were a lot of visitors. During that afternoon there was a stork for the first time. Everyone was completely lyrical. That was the symbolic birth of the entire area.”
A young one was born a few days ago. “That is completely fantastic of course. It was symbolically already a birth of a new nature reserve, but it has now completely sealed.” She hopes for even more storks in the future. “It would be nice if this stays that way. It is waiting. It remains nature.”