Storks | Ciconiiformes

Ooievaarachtigen | Storks | Cigüeñas

Large, long-legged birds with a long neck and a heavy, long bill, which take their food while walking in shallow water, on floodplains, in marshes and in wet grassland. They fly with the neck stretched out and the legs projecting well beyond the tail, on broad wings with deeply fingered tips, and cover long distances by soaring on thermals rather than by flapping; over the lowlands east of the Andes groups may circle high up in a single thermal. They are not strictly tied to one place but move with the seasonal rhythm of flooding and drying out, gathering where shrinking pools concentrate fish and other aquatic prey. The voice box is much reduced: adults call seldom and feebly, and keep contact mainly by means of the bill. The young hatch downy but helpless and stay in the nest for weeks. This guide covers three species, mainly of the Amazonian and Bolivian lowlands, with the Wood Stork also found along the coast and in the mangroves of the Pacific side.

Famílias desta ordem

Storks | Ciconiidae3 espéciesBill shape differs sharply between the genera and betrays the way each hunts: straight and pointed in the Maguari Stork (Ciconia), for probing in shallow water and seizing prey on dry land; heavy and slightly decurved in the Wood Stork (Mycteria), swept through turbid water half open and snapped shut the moment it touches a fish; huge and slightly upturned in the Jabiru, the continent's largest stork, with a bare black head and neck and a red band of skin at the base of the neck. In this region they are birds of the lowlands: the marshes and savannas of the Amazonian foothills east of the Andes and, for the Wood Stork, also the wetlands and mangroves of the Pacific coast; they are absent from the high mountains. At the nest the birds clatter the bill; this clattering takes the place of song, for the adults are all but voiceless. They void onto their own legs to keep cool, which often leaves them looking whitewashed rather than red or black. The nest is a bulky heap of sticks in a tall tree, in the Maguari also low in marsh vegetation or on the ground; the young are fed by the parents disgorging food onto the nest floor.