Earlier this week Jenny Staletovich from the Miami Herald wrote an interesting article about the changing fortunes of wood storks in south Florida. It's an accurate and well researched piece that covers a number of important issues, and it also included some fascinating titbits on their behavior (access it by clicking on the title/arrow above). My only concern is that it infers storks are doing rather well down here, which is certainly not the case, and so below I give the recent rebound in nest numbers a little more perspective.
Wood stork (photo by Mark Cook)
Current stork nesting effort in south Florida (about 2000 nests per year) is certainly an improvement on recent decades but it remains much lower than it was before the 1970's (e.g. 8500 pairs in 1961). Historically, the majority (over 70%) of the U.S population nested south of Lake Okeechobee yet now less than 25% do; this is a stark reminder that the traditional stork nesting areas in the Everglades, Big Cypress and Corkscrew Swamp are not providing the quality foraging habitat they once did. The article also failed to mention that nesting success (number of chicks fledged per nest) is generally very low. Even during years with a good number of nest starts we often see many nests fail due to inappropriate water levels and not enough food. Indeed, this is exactly what seems to be happening again this year (see my previous Everglades post for details). In this respect, the Everglades is thought to be acting as a 'sink habitat' or an 'ecological trap'; conditions there are generally good enough to trigger birds to start nesting but food resources are often insufficient to raise a family. Ultimately, not enough young storks are being produced there to sustain or grow the population.
So in my humble opinion (which doesn't count for much here) the stork should remain as a federally listed species (at least with a "Threatened" status) until we better understand the problems facing stork reproduction and have figured out how to fix them. The good news is that scientists have made great strides in the past few years in understanding the relationships between storks, water levels and their food supply, and are beginning to provide a clear way forward for how to manage and restore wetlands for these birds. Restoring the Everglades and other wetlands in south Florida is key to the stork's future, and if we can get going with that soon then the stork might have a fighting chance.