Rare Wood Stork No Longer Endangered

The American wood stork, once a species on the brink of extinction, has now made such an impressive comeback after 30 years of conservation efforts that it is no longer considered endangered, the US Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday.

These tall wading birds that nest in Southeast swamps, from Florida to the Carolinas, now don the less serious "threatened" label, given that the goal of a five-year average of 10,000 nesting pairs has not yet been reached, the agency said.

"It's a day for good news about an iconic bird from the Southeast that is doing a great job of recovering," Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told the Associated Press (AP) at a ceremony in Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge in south Georgia. Though she cautioned: "There's still important work to do before we can propose to remove it from the list altogether."

Standing at four feet tall with a wingspan of about five feet, this iconic bird is the only stork species that nests in the United States. It depends on wetlands and lots of fish and surrounding trees to protect their nests from predators. So when wetlands in the Everglades were decimated, stork populations dropped drastically from 40,000 in the 1930s to about only 10,000 in the 1970s.

They were finally deemed endangered in 1984 when the population was dropping by five percent a year, Reuters reported.

Restoring wetlands through partnerships with state governments and conservation groups has been key to increasing the wood stork's population, expanding its range to parts of North Carolina and Mississippi. When the population was labeled as endangered, its habitat was limited to Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama.

"One reason we're able to change their status is that the risk has been reduced because their numbers are more spread out," Billy Brooks, the Fish and Wildlife biologist in charge of the wood stork recovery program, told the AP. "They have improved their productivity by expanding their breeding range."

Since enacted in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has led to twenty-seven species being taken off the lists, including the bald eagle, American alligator and peregrine falcon.

In other recent reports, the State of Alaska is requesting that the NOAA remove the humpback whale from the endangered species list, citing recent population growth.