Have you ever seen a stork?

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You know, this big white bird that brings young parents their little bundle of joy The Internet claims it is not found in the USA but maybe here there are some Europeans who have seen one

In Poland (no idea if in other countries it is found too) there is a superstition that your good luck depends on what the first stork seen by you this year was doing - I mean, if it was flying, standing etc. If it was flying, it is going to bring you some really VERY good luck this year

Btw, I read that the Slavs used to believe that human souls were brought to the world by storks and maybe that's the source of the connection between storks and babies

Only Stork SB margarine.

According to Google, the wood stork is native to the southeastern USA, including florida, georgia, and the carolinas.

I'm pretty sure I've seen quite a few of them. Also egrets and ibises and herons.

Is there a similar superstition in the USA as well? That one needs to take a careful look at what the bird is doing when they see it for the first time at the beginning of the year?

And there is that superstition that having a stork's nest on your house's roof also brings good luck to the owners of this house.

The only stork lore I've heard of in the USA is the one about storks bringing babies.

I am unable to find reference to any other myths or superstitions of american origin. Mostly it's just "storks bring babies" or "storks transport souls of the departed to the afterlife, as well as back from the afterlife, into new babies, as part of reincarnation cycle".

The "storks bring new souls to newborns" concept sounds like the precursory myth behind "storks bring babies".

Storks guiding the dead and bringing new life could also be the source of "storks are lucky to have around" type beliefs. The departed are more likely to find peace, and new life is more likely to survive, cos souls are chaperoned both ways - good favor with the spirits in general, etc...

That's my guess, at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriy

This place (in Polish it's known as Wyraj - wyraj sounds very like raj which is in turn Polish for a paradise) was one where the souls of the deceased went and after some time they got reincarnated, being brought into the wombs of pregnant women by storks. That's probably the source of the belief that babies are brought by storks to the world.

I thought parents just made up that stork bringing babies myth because they were too embarrassed to tell their kids where babies come from. Parents have made up plenty of lies to tell kids about taboo subjects or to get them to behave.

No, but I've seen herons.

But still there is that question why it is about the very storks and not some other birds? Maybe it's so because only storks are big enough to carry a baby?

I asked my mother once if as a really young child, a toddler, I ever asked her where babies come from and what she told me then - she claims that as a child of maybe three I raised this issue and she told me then the stork story indeed. But later on she didn't need to lie to me because we lived in a village and kept farming animals - I often observed their copulation, later (as an older child) cows giving birth and so on. And when I was 7, I took all the books on sex that were at home (sexology was my obsessive interest back then) and learnt about this

I've never seen real live storks where I live, either. Occasionally I'd see maybe a heron or some other similar bird, but that's it.

So a stork isn't a combination stepladder/fork?