Not far from Leeuwarden, in the village of Dronrijp, was born, in 1836, one of Holland’s most eminent modern artists, although a naturalized subject of Great Britain since 1873—Sir Laurens Alma Tadema, some noted examples of whose work are to be seen in the Mesdag Museum in The Hague.
Another town, Marssum, a few miles distant, is famous as the center of the cattle district, and dealers and breeders come to some of the large farms in the vicinity from all over the world, including America, to purchase blooded Frisian stock. Indeed, all along the thirty-three miles of railway between Leeuwarden and Groningen the pastures are dotted with fine, healthy-looking black and white cows. Each field being surrounded by a small canal eight or ten feet in width, the cattle may be segregated, one herd from another, by simply closing the gates on top of the narrow hills that lead across the intervening canal from one pasture to its neighbor; thus the labor and expense of building fences is saved. As much as North Holland is noted for its cheese, just so much is Friesland famed for its butter, and between 130,000,000 and 140,000,000 pounds of it are churned annually. The conditions of the trade are exceptionally sanitary and at all times under government inspection.
Here and there through Friesland—in fact, through almost any part of the Netherlands—you will see a high wooden tripod topped with the usual cartload of débris that constitutes a stork’s nest; for the stork, be it remembered, is the national bird of Holland, and if the farmhouse offers no suitable place, such as a chimney pot, for example, for the stork to build its summer home, the farmer is wont to court the luck that a nesting stork about the place is thought to be sure to bring, and builds a nesting place for it.
They wend their migratory way northward, these storks, from the interior of Africa near the sources of the Nile, and make their appearance in Holland contemporaneous with the first signs of approaching spring. Their coming is regarded as a veritable Godsend by the Netherlander and the various Dutch journals feature the “stories” of first reported arrivals, and devote to them an amount of space commensurate with the importance of the event, while any decrease in the numbers of the birds is quickly observed and promptly linotyped.
When the storks, so high in the air that they appear as mere specks, approach the familiar scenes and nesting places of previous summers, they descend to the earth in pairs to hunt about for their old abodes. Having finally discovered these, a deal of repairing will have to be done to render them once more habitable. Both the male and the female labor with a great deal of energy and no little resourcefulness in the reconstruction of the old nest, collecting sticks and twigs, and weaving them together with much mathematical precision. Endowed with no vocal power of calling each other or criticising their work, their silence while at the task is punctuated only with a comical snapping of bill and a suggestive flapping of wings. If a certain pair has been a little premature, perhaps, and chosen, not always by mistake, another pair’s nest, the ensuing imbroglio often results in such a complete destruction of the point at issue that both pairs instead of one must build anew.
The story of the “Stork’s Judgment” is one of the best known among the Dutch with regard to these birds. It is that in the fall, prior to the departure of the storks for southern climes, all the old and decrepit ones, too weakly to stand the long trip, are killed off so that the general migration may not be delayed or impeded. Another belief held by the Hollander, more or less a child of the imagination but not without at least a tinge of fact, is that among the stork communities a certain number of picked birds are detailed each season to act in the capacity of a regular police force to preserve the peace and protect the interests of the colony at large.
A stork’s nest on the roof serves, according to the superstitions of many Dutch farmers, as a prevention to the ravages of lightning and the contraction of contagious diseases by their families. Misfortune in some form or other is sure to follow if the stork does not see fit to nest somewhere near the house, and simply because of this, land holders have been known to pack up, bag, baggage, and agricultural implements, and move into another district.