They took a little coaxing at first – after all, they had got used to a safe, comfortable aviary tucked away in woodland on the edge of Bodmin Moor. But after a few minutes, the birds stepped out into freedom and the bolder ones were soon soaring into the blue, the first white storks to be released into the wilds of Cornwall.

Yan Swiderski, the founder of the Cornwall Stork Project, had tears in his eyes. “I do feel a bit emotional,” he said. He sounded a little like a proud father wanting to play down the achievements of his offspring – and failing. “They’re a little bit clumsy at the moment. They aren’t used to flying free … but they do look majestic, don’t they?”

Twenty-one white storks, most of whom hatched on the moor this year, were released on Thursday. They will probably spend a couple of months in Cornwall getting used to freedom before heading south for the winter, perhaps to southern Spain or Morocco.

If all goes well, they will return in a few years’ time to the area where they hatched and produce their own young. “That will be so exciting,” Swiderski said.

The project is based at Hamatethy farm, which produces organic beef and pork but also runs rewilding schemes. Its stork project began in 2021 and it now has five pairs of adults that were either rescued or bred in captivity.

Swiderski, a fund manager turned farmer, said it was not possible simply to release any old white stork into a landscape as it would try to return to the place where it was born.

“The way to do it is to set up breeding aviaries. You can then release the chicks that are born in those aviaries. They’re like swallows, they have a very strong homing instinct, so they will migrate in the autumn, then hopefully come back and nest pretty much where they came from.”

The project follows the model established at the Knepp estate in West Sussex, which has been operating since 2016 and has successfully reintroduced storks. It is possible the Bodmin storks will team up with the Knepp ones to fly away for winter.

Natural England, the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England, does not sound very enthusiastic about white stork releases, though it says they are not banned. It argues that neither white nor black storks were ever native breeding birds in England.

It said there was one breeding record of the white stork in Scotland in 1416 and records of imports of storks from Calais in the 16th century.

While recognising the value of white storks as a visible and charismatic species in engaging people, Natural England said releases of white storks “are not a priority for us”.

Swiderski said: “To head off any controversy about native versus non-native, I think the important point here is that with climate change, the European natural range of birds is moving northward. We can point to the European bee-eater, the glossy ibis, the pallid harrier.”

Swiderski was distracted as one of the storks came in low over the trees. “I don’t think I’ll get tired of the sight of them – they’re so brilliant,” he said.

There was a tense moment when a crow appeared to be alarmed at the sight of a stork in its airspace and swooped in close, but nothing came of the confrontation.

Swiderski said upland Cornwall was a decent habitat for white storks. “Bodmin Moor is good in the sense that you’re not in the middle of a chemical landscape. They just need healthy soils, earthworms and insects and a bit of wetland here and there,” he said.

“People sometimes ask me what the ecological function of a white stork is and my answer is always that they engage humans with nature. If you can interest people in birds like storks – what they eat, where they come from, where they go – you can have all those conversations about healthy soils, the importance of organic farming for insects, the importance of not overgrazing for small mammal populations, thriving wetlands. And that is worth a lot.”