The conduct of storks comes very near intelligent reason.  In these regions the same season sees them all migrate.  They all start at one given signal.  And it seems to me that our crows, serving them as escort, go to bring them back, and to help them against the attacks of hostile birds.  The proof is that in this season not a single crow appears, and that they return with wounds, evident marks of the help and of the assistance that they have lent.  Who has explained to them the laws of hospitality?  Who has threatened them with the penalties of desertion?  For not one is missing from the company.  Listen, all inhospitable hearts, ye who shut your doors, whose house is never open either in the winter or in the night to travellers.  The solicitude of storks for their old would be sufficient, if our children would reflect upon it, to make them love their parents; because there is no one so failing in good sense, as not to deem it a shame to be surpassed in virtue by birds devoid of reason.  The storks surround their father, when old age makes his feathers drop off, warm him with their wings, and provide abundantly for his support, and even in their flight they help him as much as they are able, raising him gently on each side upon their wings, a conduct so notorious that it has given to gratitude the name of “antipelargosis.” From πελαργός.  On the pious affection of the stork, cf. Plato, Alc. i. 135 (§ 61), Arist., H.A. ix. 13, 20, Ælian, H.A. iii. 23 and x. 16, and Plin. x. 32.  From πελαργὸς was supposed to be derived the Pythagorean word πελαργᾶν (Diog. Laert. viii. 20), but this is now regarded as a corruption of πεδαρτᾶν.  Let no one lament poverty; let not the man whose house is bare despair of his life, when he considers the industry of the swallow.  To build her nest, she brings bits of straw in her beak; and, as she cannot raise the mud in her claws, she moistens the end of her wings in water and then rolls in very fine dust and thus procures mud. “Hirundines luto construunt, stramine roborant:  si quando inopia est luti, madefactæ multa aqua pennis pulverem spargunt.”  Plin. x. 49.  cf. Arist., Hist. An. ix. 10.  After having united, little by little, the bits of straw with this mud, as with glue, she feeds her young; and if any one of them has its eyes injured, she has a natural remedy to heal the sight of her little ones. “Chelidoniam visui saluberriman hirundines monstravere, vexatis pullorum oculis illa medentes.”  Plin. viii. 41. cf. Ælian, H.A. iii. 25.  Chelidonia is swallowwort or celandine.