RULES OF TE STORK

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 240, 11 October 1938, Page 2

RULES OF TE STORK

When it is known that the stork is going to visit a house the expectant parents always wonder just what he is going to leave them. Se seems to them a very whimsical old bird, for they never know whether to expect a baby boy or girl. Sometimes he surprises them with two babies, or even three or more.

But when we consider it all from the stork’s point of view we see that he works according to quite definite rules. The trouble is that in doing so much work he pays very little attention to the wishes of individual families. Year in and year out he brings more bo” babies than girls and, according to the New Zealand Official Year Book, in New Zealand it is about 105 or 106 boys for every 100 girls. He has to do this to keep the balance even, for the infant boys are not as strong as the girls, and four of them will die for every three of the girls.

The stork has quite a fixed rule, too, about the number of times he brings more than one baby. Year after year he refuses to make 100 trips without bringing two babies on one of them and sometimes three. On very rare occasions he has brought four. He has done it twice in New Zealand in the last twenty-six years. Once, in 1935, the stork brought four to Dunedin. and in 1919 four to Ngaruawahia. The latter were all males and in the former quadruplets one child was a male and the remaining three females.