Wildlife Spotlight: Wood Stork

Jim Rodgers Wood Storks: Four-Week-Old Nestlings

The endangered wood stork is a specialized feeder, using a technique known as grope-feeding or tactolocation to find small fish in shallow water. The stork probes with its partially open bill until it touches a fish, and then the bill snaps shut with lightning speed in around 25 milliseconds, one of the fastest known reflexes in vertebrates. Wood storks use thermals to soar as far as 80 miles from nesting areas to feed. A pair of nesting wood storks and their young require an estimated 443 pounds of fish. The decline in the wood stork population is thought to be primarily due to loss of feeding habitat. In south Florida reproduction has failed despite protection of rookeries. Feeding areas in south Florida have decreased by a third because of alteration of wetlands. Water management has also altered the historic water regime. The best water levels for the wood stork are periods of flooding during which fish flourish alternated with drier periods that concentrate fish in shallower water during the stork's nesting season.

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