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Wood Stork | Mycteria americana
Kaalkopooievaar | Cigüeña americana
The Wood Stork is the only stork in the Caribbean: a large white wetland bird with a bare grey head and a heavy, slightly decurved bill. It feeds by touch, the half-open bill held in shallow water, and so depends on drying pools in which fish become concentrated. In the region it breeds only in Cuba; it has disappeared from Hispaniola, where it formerly occurred.
Voice
Adults are nearly silent; at the colony they clatter their bills and hiss. Nestlings give a persistent, loud begging nyah-nyah.
Recording: Sue Riffe — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
83–115 cm, long-legged, with a wingspan of around one and a half metres. The plumage is white, with black flight feathers and a black tail, which in flight form a broad black trailing edge to the wing. Head and upper neck are bare, grey and scaly in texture; the bill is thick at the base, dark horn and slightly drooping towards the tip. The legs are black with pink feet. The sexes are alike. Juveniles have a grey-brown, partly feathered head and neck and a yellow bill. It flies with neck outstretched and legs trailing, often soaring high on thermals, sometimes in flocks.
Confusion species
American White Ibis Eudocimus albus is much smaller, with a red, more strongly curved bill and black only at the wingtips. Great Egret Ardea alba is all white, without black in wing or tail, has a straight yellow bill and flies with the neck retracted. American White Pelican Pelecanus erythrorhynchos also has black flight feathers, but is bulkier, short-legged and long-billed with a flat bill. Soaring high, the stork can recall a vulture, but the white body and white forewing settle it.
Habitat
Fresh and brackish marshes, flooded savannas, shallow lagoons, mangroves, rice fields and lake margins. It forages where shallow water holds fish, often in small groups, walking with the bill submerged and sometimes stirring with one foot. It nests colonially in trees in or near water, in Cuba among others in mangroves.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Locally fairly common in Cuba, with breeding colonies in the Zapata Swamp and the Sabana-Camagüey archipelago; outside the breeding season elsewhere on the island too. Formerly on Hispaniola, where it no longer breeds; rare sightings in the Dominican Republic. An irregular visitor to Trinidad from South America, mainly in the west-coast marshes. Vagrant to the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, Aruba and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Outside the region from the south-eastern United States through Mexico and Central America to Argentina.
- Resident
- Summer visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- Passage (Mar–Apr, Oct–Nov)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
The Zapata Swamp and the lagoons along the north coast of central Cuba are the places to look in the region. Flocks are best seen in the dry season, when birds gather at shrinking pools; in the afternoon they often soar high on thermals.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The Cuban population is small and depends on a few breeding areas. Threats are drainage of wetlands, changes in water management that disrupt the drying of pools, and disturbance of colonies. In Cuba it is called cayama.
Scientific name
Mycteria americana | Linnaeus, 1758
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Mycteria in that same work. Mycteria comes from the Greek muktēr, 'snout, nose' — for the large, heavy bill. americana means 'American'; Linnaeus based the species on Marcgrave's account from Brazil. The specimen the first description was based on came from Brazil.