Endangered
Milky Stork
Mycteria cinerea
The milky stork is a stork species inhabiting predominantly mangroves in Southeast Asia.
Appearance
Its plumage is white apart from a few feathers at the wings and tail.
It is currently included in the genus Mycteria, is around 91–97 cm (36–38 in) tall, with a wingspan of 43.5–50 cm (17.1–19.7 in) and a tail around 14.5–17 cm (5.7–6.7 in).
Range and habitat
The milky stork's range is restricted to Southeast Asia, where it is widely but patchily distributed. It occurs in Sumatra (its global stronghold), Java, Sulawesi, eastern Malaysia, Cambodia, southern Vietnam (where it probably largely recolonised after the war of 1963–75), Bali, Sumbawa, Lombok and Buton. It historically occurred in southern Thailand, but is now very likely extinct there.
Matang Mangrove Forest in Malaysia has been a popular candidate reintroduction site because this area is considered a suitable milky stork habitat in terms of shelter, breeding and feeding grounds, and there are apparently minimal threats from predators and parasites.
Habitat labels include wetland and forest.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The milky stork's diet is diverse. In Malaysia, the core of the diet appears to comprise mudskippers of Periophthalmus and Gobiidae 10–23 cm long. Although catfish Arius spp. May be a main dietary component in South Sumatra.
Snakes and frogs are reportedly also taken for food, especially to feed to young. Parents feed nestlings large fishes, eels, and mudskippers up to 20 cm long. Breeding typically occurs after the rains during the dry season that can last from April to November.
In crisis
Since the 1980's, the global milky stork population has declined from 5,000 to 2,000 individuals due to habitat destruction, overfishing and illegal smuggling of chicks. The global milky stork population has been declining substantially, especially from the late 1980s, and has been largely attributable to habitat destruction and disturbance through mangrove deforestation for human activities such as fish farming, tidal rice cultivation, timber exploitation, and in Indonesia, human resettlement. Breeding colonies have also declined through increased illegal international trade in this bird from the mid-1980s and, especially in South Sumatra, poaching of eggs and juveniles for human consumption.
In 1987, the first captive breeding and reintroduction project for the milky stork was initiated in Zoo Negara in Malaysia (a country where the wild milky stork population declined by over 90% from the 1980s to 2005) from a small young group of five males and five females received from Singapore Zoo and Johor Zoo. From these 10 individuals, the captive population increased to over 100 individuals by 2005.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Milky Stork is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Milky Stork, Wikidata item Q731308. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
