This is too perfect. The proverbial stork has paid a visit to Binder Park Zoo, delivering a baby stork, a stork chick to Irving and Ruthie, storks at the zoo..

This is all started when a mommy stork (Ruthie) and a daddy stork (Irving) fell in love and got married, and decided they wanted a baby stork. Lo and behold, now they are parents of a stork chicklet.

(Photo: Binder Park Zoo)
(Photo: Binder Park Zoo)
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According to Binder Park Zoo, Ruthie and Irving have been longtime residents of the savanna exhibit and they have built nests before, but they haven't been able to have kids yet. So after 21 years of trying, this came as a bit of a surprise.

As The Zoo describes to process, it begins to sound like a story straight out of a 60's sitcom, but yet very cute.

"Together the pair constructed a 5’ wide nest with Irving sitting on stones as stand-in eggs for practice until Ruthie laid a clutch of three eggs. Zoo staff switched out the eggs with 'decoy' eggs, and the real ones were transported to the Detroit Zoo for incubation. 'While marabou storks are a species of least concern, Irving and Ruthie are genetically valuable so we did want to take extra measures to protect the eggs. We also had a little concern about Irving and Ruthie’s lack of experience as parents, so we moved the nest to a secure location at our vet hospital to monitor them by camera'" - Kathryn Sippel, Binder Park Zoo curator of Collections

Officials at Binder Park Zoo says they don't know why the two marabou storks took so long to propagate their species.

Educational moment:

The marabou stork (Leptoptilos crumenifer) is a massive bird found in Africa, from the Sahara desert to South Africa. They live in the savannas and open areas, but will also live close to human habitation. They are frequent scavengers, eating carrion (dead animals), fish, reptiles, insects, birds, frogs, and rodents and food scraps near homes, farms, and landfills in Africa. - Binder Park Zoo release

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