Soviet water towers in the Baltic - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Storks Lead the Way!

Published: 14 December 2021 ~ How to Weaponise Your Old Soviet Water Tower

Travelling through the former East Prussian countryside with your history head on means looking out onto a peculiar and unique scene, a hybrid landscape where two chunks of geo-political and socio-cultural history collide, the one German and the other Soviet Russian. One of the most prominent reminders of the Soviet era is the regular and recurring presence of tall, slim cylindrical objects, sometimes made of metal but mainly cast from concrete, that sprout up out of the ground in the most unlikely of places.

To look at them, the first impression is that the giant stork’s nests that sit on top are so dense with branches and twigs that nothing less solid could possibly support them, but these obtrusive objects are not a Soviet ornithologist’s answer to housing the region’s storks, they are, in fact, water towers, the expanded crests of which are routinely commandeered by the long-legged wading birds for conversion into high-rise flats.

The size of the nests and the size of their occupants never cease to amaze me, and although I have grown used to the concrete fingers on which these nests and their homesteaders sit, pointing up to the sky like prehistoric surface-to-air missiles, they bookmark a period of history for me in which concrete structures predominate.

Whilst nest, bird and concrete post vary little from one example to another, I recently came across a combination that possessed in its composition something remarkably different. It is the one depicted in this post’s opening photograph. I hardly need to ask you to look carefully at the photograph to determine what that difference is.

How to weaponise your old Soviet water tower

It would appear that this particular Stork family has not responded lightly to the latest round of NATO sabre rattling and has taken precautionary measures to ensure that it is not caught napping. I mean what else could that be protruding from the nest if not some sort of high-powered anti-aircraft gun or advanced missile defence system?

I am no authority on birds, migrating or otherwise, so I cannot say whether England’s south coast is a habitat for stork’s nests or not, but, if so, we would be foolish not to take a leaf out of the Baltic Region’s Storks’ Survival Handbook.

During the Second World War a series of radar pylons strung along the south coast of England was credited as having parity with the Spitfire in preserving the country from Nazi invasion. Today, raised atop the White Cliffs of Dover, ‘Stork’ installations would obviously make excellent radar masts and also jolly good gun emplacements to ward off any invasion inconceivably orchestrated from across the English Channel.

Just a thought …