Wood storks fill up on fish at construction site
As crews dumped dirt into a canal to clear way for more construction, they inadvertently created a feeding trough for a rare breed of bird.
At least a dozen wood storks swooped in and grabbed fish after fish from the shallow water at the 9.8-acre construction site near University Drive and Pasadena Avenue in Pembroke Pines.
There were so many storks feeding that some passers-by assumed the construction was shoving the animal from its habitat.
“I found it strange that there were so many of them there and that there was all this construction equipment, too. It just looked like they were being displaced,” said Barbara Ganson, who snapped several pictures of the scene from her car.
Ganson said she called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, which exSouth Diane Hirth, spokeswoman for the wildlife commission
plained the site was not a nesting zone for the wood stork, the only native stork to North America. Broward County is one of the few areas in the U.S. where the birds, a threatened species, live.
In Pembroke Pines, the wood stork lives inside 300 acres of wetlands off Sheridan Street and has been spotted in Sunrise and Deerfield Beach. They also make their home in Georgia, the Carolinas, the Caribbean and Central and America.
Last December, a developer broke ground on the 206-unit Ventura Pointe apartment complex.
“Wood storks roost and forage around ditches, canals, and ponds, and they may have been attracted to the site by the retention pond constructed as part of the project,” said Diane Hirth, spokeswoman for the wildlife commission.
Doug Young, the chief operating officer of the South Florida Audubon Society, said the wood stork has a voracious appetite for fish.
At full size, the wood stork’s wingspan can reach 6 feet and they can stand over 4 feet tall. Their heads and necks are black and their body is white.
“A pair of them with two little fledglings can eat over 400 pounds of fish in a breeding season,” Young said.
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