Maguari Stork

Ciconia maguari


The Birds of the World website introduces the Maguari Stork with this descriptive information:  The Maguari Stork is a large black-and-white stork found in open habitats throughout South America east of the Andes. The sole member of Ciconia in the New World, it was for a good part of the twentieth century placed in its own genus Euxenura, which means ‘truly strange tail’, a reference to its very short forked tail. Later studies based on behavioral and skeletal traits grouped the current species with Ciconia, a result that was supported by analysis of cytochrome b and DNA-DNA hybridization distances in the Ciconiidae. Within Ciconia, Maguari Stork shares the forked tail with a tropical stork from the Old World, Asian Woolly-necked Stork (Ciconia episcopus).

Like its congeners, Maguari Stork is a social species that is a colonial nester and group forager. An opportunistic visual feeder, it feeds on a wide variety of aquatic prey such as frogs, tadpoles, fish, eels, snakes, and aquatic insects, but becomes less tied to freshwater habitats and more catholic in its diet during the non-breeding season, when it wanders widely in search of locally abundant prey that may include rodents.Maguari Stork is decidedly more common in the southern part of the range, where groups of several hundreds are sometimes seen together.

I met my first Maguari Stork on Thursday morning, August 24, 2023.  Our Jeff Parker Tour group had been staying at Southwild’s Fazenda Santa Tereza and on this morning we were headed south on the Transpantaneira Highway enroute  to Porto Jofre and ultimately the Jaguar Flotel.  It was along the Transpantaneira that I watched and photographed this bird as it stood majestically near the road.  For details of my Brazilian trip that include the sighting of this bird, look here.  Below are a couple of my photos of this beautiful stork.