Stork Sign Business Meets With Fowl Play

Debbie Patterson is tired of having her birds fly the coop. Since April, six of her colorful plywood storks have disappeared, seemingly into thin air.

Patterson is the owner of Stork Lady, a business that rents stork signs for $45 to $55 to families and friends who want to announce their new bouncing babies to the neighborhood. Business has flourished since Patterson started barking the big birds last January. But then this spring, the business met with foul play.

“I don’t know who would want to take these,” Patterson says, “they’re a real hassle to handle. They’re seven feet tall.”

Patterson says a couple of friends think her competitors in the stork rental business might be encouraging her birds to fly south for the winter, permanently. But she thinks the cuckoo culprits must be high school kids playing pranks. “With the current baby boom, there’s just plenty of this stork business to go around. There’s more than enough for everybody,” Patterson says.

Most of the missing storks were taken from clients’ yards in the Park Cities area, though University Park police investigator J.V. McDonell, the man assigned to find Patterson’s feathered friends, says only one stork was actually stolen within official UP boundaries. He says no other stork businesses have reported missing birds. Mc-Donell says he worked for two weeks on Patterson’s case, then suspended the investigation.

“There just wasn’t any evidence. None at all,” McDonell says. Not even a trail of plastic bird droppings? “Nothing.” McDonell takes this fowl filching business very seriously.

Patterson has managed to recover a couple of the storks herself. One of them was found with its beak broken, a pretty serious injury for a stork. No longer able to hold its symbolic bundle, the bird had to be destroyed. Another stork was stolen from a house in Carrollton and turned up in the neighborhood in someone else’s front yard. Can you imagine the surprise on that husband’s face when he drove into the driveway?

Despite the strain on her stork stock, Patterson continues to do a booming business and does her best to keep up with the swelling Dallas birthrate. She just wishes her missing storks would fly back to the barnyard.