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Species Spotlight: The Wood Stork
The sight of the rough, bald and blackish-gray head of a wood stork makes it easy to believe the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Three feet tall, with a six-foot wingspan, wood storks have an air of the Jurassic about them, and invite comparisons to the historical pterodactyl or the mythological roc.
As one of the largest birds that breed in North America, and the only native stork on this continent, wood storks put the “big" in “big bird." Witnessing one of these massive creatures take off is a rare treat. Although they historically ranged throughout many parts of the United States, and may have numbered as many as 150,000 at one time, habitat destruction reduced the count to around 11,000. The breeding populations of these birds are now found mainly in the Southeast.
Wood storks spend much of their time building nests in cypress and mangrove swamps and hunting for fish and other critters. They forage with their bills dipped in the water and partly open, and can clamp down on prey in an average of 25 milliseconds—one of the fastest reflexes known in vertebrates.
Without the continued protection of the Endangered Species Act, though, the wood stork may join the inauspicious ranks of its forbears, and in the future, as with the dinosaurs, the birds may only be seen in blockbuster movies and as children’s toys.
