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For you dear @intotheurbanwilds, I will talk about North America’s only native stork and one of my favorite birds: Wood Storks!
I like to think of them as reverse-aging birds. Because usually (altricial) birds are naked and ugly when they first hatch, then they become fluffy and cute, then they get their adult feathers and become Beauty & Grace given physical form.
Not so with wood storks!
Here’s a lil baby one. It has fluffy downy baby feathers, it can’t stand, it’s probably real floppy. Just a normal nestling trying to understand what the hell is going on.
Now here’s a juvenile. Not the prettiest bird in the world, but y’know. it’s got a certain scruffy, scrappy appeal. We can’t all be snowy egrets. It’s rocking what it was born with!
And here’s a full-grown adult wood stork that has completed its transformation into a Skesis
What happened to your head, bruh?
What the hell is going on here???
^Literally the fucking Chamberlain
They are colonial nesters and their roosts and rookeries absolutely smell as bad as they look.
But looks aren’t everything. They’re actually pretty cool birds, and their US population needs some help. To understand why they’re in trouble, you need to understand 2 things: 1 how wood storks find food and 2 Florida seasonal weather patterns (past and present).
You’ve probably seen herons and egrets hunting before, right? They stand really still, or walk really slowly, visually looking for fish or invertebrates…then they strike!
Well the wood stork hunts differently. Wood storks are tactile hunters. They stand in shallow water with their beaks open, sometimes shuffling their feet to kick something up, and snap it shut when they feel something swim by.
How this fits in makes more sense when you know a little bit about the hydrology of south Florida. South Florida has 2 seasons: the wet season, and the dry season. The wet season goes from April-Oct (roughly) and the dry from Nov-March (roughly). Most of the rain that falls in FL falls during that wet season. Note that the Atlantic hurricane season is within that window.
This graphic I stole from the internet illustrates how water used to flow through the southern part of FL circa 1800′s. It also illustrates how big the Everglades used to be. Before development, the Kissimmee River would flow into Lake Okeechobee, which would overflow every year. And that water, plus the water from surrounding little wetland areas, would flow into and through the Everglades. The famous quote about the Everglades being “a river of grass” isn’t just poetic language. That gigantic swampland historically acted as a slow moving river, carrying the annual deluge of freshwater from the rainy season out to sea, and refreshing wetland areas and estuaries as it went along.
The red outline here is the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. Note how it once reached all the way up near Orlando, where the Kissimmee River starts.
And this is a pretty succinct Before & After. On the left note that all that space between Lake Okeechobee and the sea was sawgrass, cypress, and marshland. Along the coast were pine flatwoods and fringing salt marsh. Now that space is West Palm Beach, Ft Lauderdale, and Miami. No more river of grass.
So what does this have to do with wood storks? For centuries, south Florida in general and the Everglades in particular hosted nearly all the wood stork nests in the United States. Florida wood storks nest in the winter, during the dry season. Because they are tactile feeders, they rely on fish and invertebrates getting trapped in shallow water during the dry season right when they have nestlings to feed.
These habitats are called short hydroperiod wetlands. They are exactly what they sound like. Habitats like ponds, rivers, cypress swamps, and marshes are inundated with water all year, even if that water level changes seasonally. Short hydroperiod wetlands are those wetland areas that flood during the wet season, then dry up during the dry season.
A wet prairie like this one is a prime example. Imagine, during the wet season all sorts of fish and aquatic invertebrates swim in and through here. But as the dry season starts, a wet prairie like this becomes isolated from larger streams/rivers/swamps, and eventually dries up. If you are a hungry wood stork with equally hungry babies to feed, you are counting on whatever prey gets trapped here.
And unfortunately, that isn’t happening as much anymore. I’ll leave you all with this last graph from Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Naples, FL. Corkscrew Swamp was once the most productive wood stork colony in the entire nation. Today? Not so much.
There is hope though! There are many people dedicated to restoring the Everglades, and helping wood storks in particular. I implore you all to educate yourselves about these conservation efforts, and more than anything else to support politicians who won’t gut what wilderness areas remain.
Cynics like to say voting and politics don’t matter, but we have reams of conservation data showing how untrue that is. The conservation success stories that exist in this nation–and there are several–happened thanks to sustained, effective funded political action. The laws that protect our wildlife are an outcome of political action. And they can be taken away by the same means.
Ask game is from this post. Send me any emoji, and I will tell you whatever I want.
