Storks are supposed to be migrating from Europe to Africa during winter. This year, however, the storks decided to cancel their migration because of a landfill full of junk food.
According to a study, thousands of storks have chosen to stay and gorge on garbage in the landfills of the south-central part of Portugal. It was published in the journal Movement Ecology on Tuesday, as reported by New York Times.
"Before the '80s there were no storks in the Iberian Peninsula in Europe during the winter," said Aldina Franco, a conservation ecologist from the University of East Anglia in England and a co-author of the paper. "Suddenly we saw a few birds and then the number increased and now we have 14,000 birds in Portugal in the winter."
Storks used to stop at landfills while migrating to fuel up on their journey, according to previous studies. However, the new study shows that the storks decided to become permanent residents of Portugal because of the year-round food supply.
"Landfill sites provide abundant food resources that are reliable in both space and time, thus likely contributing to enabling individuals to remain in their breeding territory and on their nests year-round," the research team explained on their study, Value Walk reported.
Because of the easier food access, storks in Portugal are 10 times more than it was 20 years ago. The storks have no plans of leaving the place.
"We found that the landfill sites enable year-round next use, which is an entirely new behavior that has developed very recently. This strategy enables the resident birds to select the best nest sites and to start breeding earlier," said Franco.
Franco also believes that the storks which did not fly south may have breeding advantage as well because they are already in place comes mating season.
According to her, if the storks have nests near a guaranteed food supply, that means storks are less likely to fly south during winter. Instead, the storks will spend their non-breeding season defending their nests locations.
