Abstract

‘Candida avis’ is usually assumed to be the white stork . T. E. Page, the Loeb editors and others give a footnote to this effect. T. F. Royds in The Beasts, Birds and Bees of Virgil says of ‘Candida avis’: ‘This is by common consent ‘Ciconia alba’, the white stork. It is a migrant in Mediterranean countries…a most useful bird feeding chiefly on snakes and other reptiles’ He then cites Pliny and Juvenal ‘serpente ciconia pullos nutrit’ to confirm the snake-eating propensities of the stork. Virgil's ornithological mystery is not, however, quite so easily resolved. There is another contender for ‘Candida avis’, one more convincing both on a textual and an ornithological basis — Circaetus gallicus, the short-toed eagle. The short-toed eagle is the only European snake eagle, its diet being almost exclusively snakes. Lizards, and much less frequently small mammals or birds, may also be taken