Puzzle Description:

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#1: vindersloon (vindersloon) on Jan 21, 2009 [SPOILER]

The official symbol of my city is a stork.
The inofficial symbol is a heron. (Reigah)

Very nice ! Thanks for your entry.

Very good job on both birds in such a limited size. We don't see storks here, but there is a heron that lives very close to me in a swampy area. It is quite beautiful to watch when it is flying overhead. Good luck with the contest!

with city? good looking storks

I had no idea cities had symbols. Is that true for all cities?

most adam

It's in the weapon of the city. (I won't tell the city yet, maybe someone knows by just the hints so far.)

The Hague ?

Beautiful!

Yes. (wasn't that difficult :-)

My town has swans has its symbols. The swans reside in Mirror Pond which is a slow spot of the Deschutes River right in downtown Bend, Oregon (named after the "bend" in the river). Too many geese and ducks also live here year around, but nobody has them on their logos. Instead the city provides food laced with "birdy" birth control.

Good puzzle. I'm enjoying the stories everyone is sharing about their cities.

Birth control for promiscuous birds? How funny, but a great idea.

My home town, Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a river running through it named the Huron River, after the indian tribe, but we have lots of great blue herons, and I suspect half the town thinks the river is named after them. If the city had an official bird, it would almost certainly be the heron. Their coloring seems pretty fancy, but it's amazing how they can disappear among the old tree stumps at the side of a river.

We don't have storks, but we have lots of sandhill cranes. One year I got recruited by a bunch of bird rescue people. They'd spotted a pair of sandhill cranes who had a chick who couldn't fly. Though temperatures had fallen below freezing, the parent cranes had refused to fly south with the other cranes and the bird rescue people were afraid the whole family would freeze. They wanted to catch the youngster, so they could raise it in captivity and so the parents would fly south. We spent hours stomping around in a frozen swamp trying to catch this big young bird while the parents circled overhead clacking warnings. They baby couldn't fly, but he could move fast, including traveling through the air for several wing strokes, and all our attempts to encircle him on the ice failed. We eventually gave up. A larger team came back later and succeeded, but I missed that outing.

With regards to cities and their symbols - our Northern Ontario towns have a tradition of putting a statue of their symbol right out by the highway, so you can't miss it when you're driving by. Moonbeam has a flying saucer, for example. Other towns have moose, or bears, or - in one case - a giant nickle. :-) I think it's like that right across Canada, but I'm not sure.

Bigger cities, like Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa, on the other hand, tend not to have just one symbol. And their symbols seem to end up being things people have built - like the CN Tower, or the Rideau Canal.

Nice puzzle.
Texas towns are starting to have mascots - typically depicted by a set of small concrete statues placed around, having been painted by various artists.
Austin has guitars. Odessa has jackrabbits. (see jamesclark.com blog for Sept 25 for pictures) Hutto has hippos. I've seen others but can't remember now where.

My city doesn't have a bird although the state has one (the Loon). We do have a river however, and it appears on the city seal and in our slogan.

As far as statues painted by various artists - St. Paul is the birthplace of Charles Shultz and so over the course of several years, different Peanuts characters have been made en masse, different artists or groups bid for the right to paint them and then they are auctioned off to business and individuals who display them. They're usually featured at the State Fair for a period of time. So far I believe they've done Snoopy, Charlie, Lucy and Linus. The Science Museum also did a similar thing with dinosaurs.

Oh, and nice puzzle, BTW. Similar to Jan - we don't have storks here but do have plenty of blue herons, egrets and some small groups of sandhill cranes.

Living in Eugene, OR, I'm not sure we have a specific animal symbol, officially. Unofficially, however, it is most certainly the duck, because of the presence of UofO, and their mascot.

Very pretty... enjoyed solving it too!!! Thanks :-)

No storks in the states, but I see egrets and herons all the time in Louisiana. The state bird is the brown pelican, and the state flag has a pelican stabbing herself in the breast to feed her babies.

"In medieval Europe, the pelican was thought to be particularly attentive to her young, to the point of providing her own blood by wounding her own breast when no other food was available. As a result, the pelican became a symbol of the Passion of Jesus and of the Eucharist....
The self-sacrificial aspect of the pelican was reinforced by the widely-read mediaeval bestiaries. The device of "a pelican in her piety" or "a pelican vulning (from Latin vulno to wound) herself" was used in heraldry."

If Baton Rouge has a mascot, it's probably LSU's Mike the Tiger.

No storks? How are babies born then?

As far as I can tell, they're flown all the way from Africa. That's why it takes 9 months.

Ahhhh!

Lots of people around the US now rent wooden storks to plant in their front yard to announce the arrival of their offspring. I think they've been available for over 10 years now.

This is a beautiful puzzle.

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