Oriental White Stork

Appearance

It is typically larger than the white stork, at 100–129 cm (39.5–51 in) long, 110–150 cm (43–59 in) tall, a weight of 2.8–5.9 kg (6.2–13.0 lb) and a wingspan of 2.22 m (7.3 ft). Unlike its more widespread cousin, the Oriental stork has red skin around its eye, with a whitish iris and black bill. The young are white with orange bills.

Range and habitat

The Oriental stork is found in Japan, China, Korea and Siberia.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

The Oriental stork is a solitary bird except during the breeding season. Its diet consists mainly of fish, frog, insects, small birds and reptiles, as well as rodents.

After breeding, the storks migrate to eastern China in September and return in March.

In crisis

Due to habitat loss and overhunting, the Oriental stork is classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. A chromosome-scale reference genome sequenced for the species showed a relatively high genetic diversity, that is considered to indicate that the population has a strong genetic capacity to recover from declines.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

Oriental White 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 Oriental White Stork, Wikidata item Q998495. 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.