Satellite Tracking	Birds	Land Animals	Marine Animals	Fish	Internet Resources

A wood stork is a long-legged wading bird, which lives in freshwater and coastal marshes in the southeastern United States, Mexico and Central and South America. It's a mostly-white birds measuring 35-45 inches long with a 65 inch wingspan. It weighs six to ten pounds.

Wood storks are sociable and like living in flocks, which can range from small to quite large. They do, however, nest in monogamous pairs.

Wood storks eat small fish, tadpoles, frogs, snakes and other small aquatic animals -- even young alligators. Sometimes storks capture insects in their long bills and eat them as they as they wade around in shallow water along the edges of lakes and streams and marshes.

Wood stork nests in North America usually are found in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Occasionally they are seen in coastal swamps between Texas and South Carolina. They also are spread across Central and South America.

Pairs of storks build nests together. The male carries materials to the female at the nest. They construct a flimsy platform of sticks in the top of a cypress tree. Such platforms often are as high as 75-80 feet or more above ground. On the other hand, a nest sometimes is seen in a mangrove tree only a few feet above the water.

The population of wood storks, known to biiologists as Mycteria americana, has declined sharply in the United States since the early 1900's. A hundred years ago, more 150,000 wood storks nested in Florida. Today, there are only 7,000 to 10,000 storks in all of the United States.

The decline was caused mostly by the steady loss of natural habitat over the century. Conservation biologists describe the current population as alarmingly low. Wood storks are on the endangered species list in the United States.

Tracking Storks by Satellite

Scientists would like to understand the biology of wood storks so that the current population can be protected by educated wildlife management. To that end, they outfitted four wood storks in 1998 with tiny two-ounce radio transmitters, which reported the locations and activity levels of the birds.

The radio backpack contained a telemetry unit that transmitted a very high frequency (VHF) signal, for ground and airplane tracking, and an ultra high frequency (UHF) signal for ARGOS satellite tracking. The data was able to reveal the location of a stork, with accuracy ranging from 300 feet to a few miles, as well as evidence of the stork's activity.

The transmitters sent signals to NOAA weather satellites every fifth day. That radio data was sent on to the biologists and wildlife educators. The harness and transmitter did not impede the bird's movements.

The storks were tracked from their summer breeding grounds at Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge in Georgia to their wintering areas of southern Georgia and Florida.

Tracking Storks in Europe

The German space agency Deutsche Agentur Fur Raumfahrt Angelegenheit (DARA) used orbiting space satellites in the mid-1990s to track storks migrating across Europe, as well as deer and other wildlife migrating along the Austrian/Czech border.

A Russian rocket in 1993 ferried to Earth orbit an environmental research satellite known as Resurs-O (Resource-O). Among the electronics inside the satellite was Germany's SAFIR science payload, a forerunner of environmental satellites from the Department of Research and Technology (BMFT).

SAFIR contained an American five-channel GPS navigation receiver for wildlife tracking. The satellite also was used to relay data to a German research station in Antarctica.

SOURCES: Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Walt Disney's Animal Kingdom, Zoo Atlanta, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Space Satellite Handbook.

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