Every time the stork stood and spread his wings I raised the camera and focused. I was ready for the flight take off.
He did this stretch over and over, each time I got ready. A few times a pushed the shutter because I was ready!
Well, as expected I stopped lifting the lens. And when I did…
Gone.
After watching how crazy the big Wood Storks could be in a large group it was reassuring to see two this calm.
Storks are supposed to be this way!
The big Wood Storks are known as a slow and calm bird. Little excitement happens around them when you watch a group out in the marshes.
Get them all bunched together in a rookery, the exact opposite. Chaos and constant battles. These birds are big and have huge dangerous beaks. I wouldn’t argue with them!
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Something relatively new, a Wood Stork rookery you can actually see. This is the back side of an island in Port Royal, South Carolina.
There’s been a rookery here for a long time, just not as big and certainly no Wood Storks.
These are one of the largest (big) birds in North America and here are some many you can’t count them.
Best viewed large.
There are several small islands here, each has places the Storks have taken over. 😊
This is a small piece of the crazy goings on. There were another 50+ in the rookery getting all worked up.
These are big birds, almost as tall as a person, and those huge beaks were snapping loud.
When one group would finally settle down something would happen in another.
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Watching this I shot a good number of photographs (big surprise). I have started to go through them trying to break it down into small segments. This was the most Wood Storks I’ve seen all together in one rookery.
I knew he was about to take off, he had the sticks and was leaning off the trees. Of course he went in the opposite direction I had been ready for.
I’m OK with these. Any shots of a Stork exit and flight is good.
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Amazing to be able to get these shots. They were rare in the US, and about to be gone.
She was nesting with a large number of other storks in the Port Royal rookery. Impossible to get a count of how many were around.
Wood Storks have taken the high brush and trees on the islands in Cypress Wetlands. This year there are even more nesting than ever. This makes the wetlands the 6th stork rookery in South Carolina.
However, between Edisto Island and Donnelley the storks that nest there have not been seen in the air. There’s no access to the rookery site to check but these storks may have gone down to Cypress. It’s really not that far.
