Late in December, about the same time federal
wildlife officials were filing notice of their intention to take the wood stork
off the endangered species list, wading bird experts at the South Florida Water
Management District were finishing a report detailing the plight of the bird
after three years of poor nesting.
In the Everglades National Park, “the federally
endangered wood stork fared particularly poorly and it is thought that all 820
nests failed or were abandoned,” wrote Mark Cook, a scientist at the district
and co-editor of the district’s annual South Florida Wading Bird Report.
There were similar findings at a wood stork
rookery at the Palm Beach County Solid Waste Authority site near Jog Road and 45th
Street.
“Of the 57 nests that were monitored over time,
15 were successful,” Rena Borkhataria and Mary Beth Morrison wrote in the
report. “In contrast … the probability of a nest surviving for at least 90 days
was nearly twice that of 2012.”
The bleakest report came from the Corkscrew
Swamp Sanctuary near Naples, where wood storks historically have nested in
large numbers. The 2012 nesting season capped five years when the storks failed
to breed there. Cook described it as an “unprecedented decline” that could
indicate a “serious reduction” in foraging habitat for the wood stork.
The U.S. Department of the Interior published
notice Dec. 26 that it intended to reclassify the wood stork from endangered to
threatened and asked for public comment on its proposal. According to the
department, the down-listing is justified because when the wood stork was put
on the endangered list in 1984, the birds lived only in Florida, Georgia, South
Carolina and Alabama. However, the wood storks’ breeding range has expanded and
they are now also found in North Carolina and Mississippi.
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