26 July 2013 / leggypeggy

Storks deliver babies! They make them too!

birds, Brazil, jabirus, Oasis Overland, overland travel, Pantanal, South America, storks, travel, wetlands

A jabiru couple later that afternoon (scroll down for more pics)

If you’re hoping to see a jabiru—a large white, black and red stork—try heading to their natural territories in South America.

We’re in the Pantanal wetlands at the moment and I hadn’t realised that it’s one of the best places in the world to see jabirus in the wild. I guess that’s not surprising after what I saw them getting up to in their nest yesterday. Blush!

We were on a two-hour nature walk through the property where we’re camping for a couple of nights. We’d just made it to the algae-clogged pond with a couple of resident caimans and a range of smallish birds.

But I spied a stork’s nest behind me in the distance. There wasn’t a single stork in it, but after seeing such nests in Morocco and Turkey, I knew immediately that it was the home of some type of stork. They love building nests of sticks on the top of telephone poles, high up in trees and on the top of columns in Roman ruins.

Mrs Stork clears out the riff-raff

So I watched and waited. Some small birds were playing in the nest and I wondered if they were squatters, but suddenly Mrs Stork arrived and shooed them away quick-smart.

She scratched around for a bit and then Mr Stork arrived ‘home’; perhaps after a long day of delivering babies. No doubt about it, he was ready for some monkey business.

Hi honey, I’m home

It all played out so quickly that I only had time to rapid-fire away with the camera, so now I can share it with you. We won’t be here when the Storks babies are delivered, but I may have seen history in the making. Jabirus rarely breed successfully two years in a row.

Antics in the air

Jabirus are the tallest flying bird found in South and Central America, and have the second longest wingspan (after the Andean condor). Large males can be up to 1.5 metres tall with a wing span approaching 3 metres. Their name comes from the Tupi-Guarani language and means ‘swollen neck’.