Vienna Photos: Stork in Schönbrunn Palace

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Once upon a time in summer 2007, I walked through the parks of the Imperial Palace of Schloss Schönbrunn and suddenly I saw a stork. Totally not impressed at all by excited tourist groups from Japan and North America, it sat in the middle of a flower bed and had a nap. I took a few pictures, then a walk through the park (I worked in the nearby ORF Zentrum at that time) and then returned to the flower bed. The stork had woken up and started to stroll around in the flower bed, posing in a model-like manner for me. Pretty cool. One of the resulting pictures is displayed above.

The funny thing about this story is that I had been to the Burgenland only a few weeks earlier, where I had tried to take pictures of storks in the town of Rust. There, I didn′t manage to get closer than maybe 40 metres - but the stork in Schönbrunn didn′t give a shit about anyone even as close as five metres.

Note that this was a wild stork; which matched well with the Baroque appreciation for wildlife in general and birds in particular. In the Schönbrunn parks, there was a pigeon volaire in the 18th century and the zoo of Schönbrunn still exists until today. There you won′t find any European storks, though.