Where Baby Storks Come From

Originally distributed September 2009

Do you know where baby storks come from? A human carries them in a white sack and puts the baby storks in their parents’ nests.

 (Ok, that took forever. I'm never uploading a video again.)

If you’re curious about what I’m doing in the field these days, I’ve been busy monitoring Marabou Stork nests. Marabou Storks are not the prettiest birds but they’re still interesting. The population that breeds in Swaziland is rather small and would go extinct if isolated from populations in neighboring countries. This year we’re doing a supplementary feeding experiment to see if it increases the number of fledglings produced. Normally, Marabous have 2-3 eggs per nest and often all 3 hatch. But the 3^rd chick rarely survives to fledging. So we’ll see if additional food makes any difference.

The chicks, by many people’s standards, are just as unattractive as their parents. But when you work with them, you manage to find them cute somehow, at least when they’re small. Unfortunately, they grow really fast so they’re not cute for long.

Their nests are in Umbrella Thorn trees, which only reach 20ft tall or so. Still you need a ladder to get to the nest and take the chicks out so they can be weighed, measured, photographed, and this year fed, every few days.

Working with Marabou Storks is a very stinky job. Some of the food we feed them, cow stomach and intestines, stinks. The parents forage at dump sites for the chicks’ food, so that stinks. Sometimes when we handle the chicks they vomit from the stress, and that really stinks! Even better, we have to examine what they throw up, if it hasn’t been too digested yet, to identify what they ate. Sometimes there are maggots crawling in the food that was in their stomachs. So yes, that means the birds had live maggots crawling around in their stomachs. Yummy! And of course they regularly relieve themselves on us so that’s quite messy.

Now there’s a chick that appears to be abandoned by its parents so it’s getting really dehydrated. We gave it some water the other day, which required holding its bill open for a while. We saw maggots crawling in the corners of its bill inside its mouth. Delicious! Anybody want to come help with this project?