I saw a picture of a man wearing a stork costume in this book, The Folk Arts of Poland. It was among a whole lot of carnival costumes, mummers, carolers, and kukeri. See the chapter, Art in Rituals and Customs if you are interested in European shamanism. The costumes looked like the ones in The Dancing Goddesses by E.W. Barber.
I never saw the stork costume before, so I looked it up. Google translate says that stork costume is "bocian stroj" in Polish. When I searched this, I discovered that Polish people have zillions of these stork costumes. Sometimes, Polish children do school plays dressed as storks and frogs - maybe to celebrate the arrival of spring?
What if our traditional pictures of storks bringing babies... what if it's a hint at an old fertility religion, some trace of ancient European shamanism? But then why storks in particular? I remembered the story that passenger pigeons once darkened the skies in America. Could it be that migrating birds were once so many that they could darken the skies over Europe? That would be very far in the past.
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