Wood Storks Shift Nesting Sites as Southwest Florida Water Changes

Audubon’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary as soon as hosted the biggest Wooden Stork nesting colony in North America. As improvement continues to affect the Southwest Florida panorama, Wooden Storks have moved their nesting websites to inland islands that supply extra safety from predators. Audubon scientists assume these new websites counsel that if we restore water Wooden Storks may return to the Sanctuary.

Wooden Storks nest in colonies, sometimes in treetops. They like nest websites which might be surrounded by water and maintain alligators, because the alligators scale back predators like raccoons. Till pretty lately, the cypress timber of the historic colony at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary have been island-like, standing excessive above a marsh that full of water all through the nesting season. Though nest numbers at Corkscrew decreased since the Nineteen Sixties and 70s, Wooden Storks continued to nest there almost yearly till about 2006.

Round this time, Audubon biologists started monitoring two new Southwest Florida colonies often called BC-29 and Lenore Island. Wooden Storks constantly make 500-700 mixed nests annually at these two colonies, whereas nesting occasionally and in very small numbers at Corkscrew.

“The core foraging areas of those two new colonies overlap with the core foraging space of the historic Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary colony,” explains Director of Conservation Shawn Clem, PhD. “This implies they’re utilizing the identical meals sources, so I imagine that if we can enhance nesting situations on the Sanctuary, these Wooden Storks might come again to nest right here.”

Audubon workers are partnering with companies, native governments, organizations, and neighborhood members throughout Southwest Florida to do exactly that. Launched in 2024, the Corkscrew Watershed Initiative is a brand new collaborative planning research by the South Florida Water Administration District devoted to the conservation and restoration of the Corkscrew Swamp in Southwest Florida, encompassing northern Collier and southern Lee counties.

Key parts of the initiative embody habitat restoration, which goals to increase the size of time that water stays on the floor of the land, and restoring pure flows of water. A major focus is figuring out initiatives that can improve the area’s resilience to flooding, wildfire, and local weather change. 

Wooden Storks at the moment nesting in Southwest Florida characterize solely a fraction of the birds that when nested right here, as improvement has pushed a lack of foraging habitat throughout the area. Restoration initiatives at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, along with initiatives designed by the brand new initiative, goal to convey again habitat and water flows, making a extra resilient future for each Wooden Storks and other people.

This text was revealed within the State of the Everglades Report/Spring 2025 edition