World News | Tropical Stork Ends Up in New York, Dies After Eating Litter
Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. A wood stork typically seen in tropical and subtropical regions migrated to New York City but died 10 days after it was first spotted on Staten Island, apparently after eating a large piece of hardened foam, researchers said.
New York, Aus 18 (AP) A wood stork typically seen in tropical and subtropical regions migrated to New York City but died 10 days after it was first spotted on Staten Island, apparently after eating a large piece of hardened foam, researchers said.
The juvenile wood stork was first seen by bird researcher Anthony Ciancimino on July 31 in a saltwater marsh near Staten Island's Amazon warehouse, the Staten Island Advance reported.
Also Read | TikTok Not To Lift Ban on Content That Promote Taliban After the Fall of Afghanistan.
Lawrence Pugliares, a nature photographer and administrator of a Staten Island wildlife Facebook group, received a call on Aug. 9 from a group member who said the stork appeared to be choking, the newspaper reported. The bird died soon after Pugliares arrived to check on it.
José Ramírez-Garofalo and Shannon Curley, two adjunct biology professors at the College of Staten Island, brought the stork to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where a necropsy revealed a piece of insular foam more than 3 feet (1 meter) long in the bird's stomach. “It was in the gut of the animal so it presumably ate it thinking it was a prey item like an eel or a snake,” Curley told the Advance.
Also Read | Afghanistan Crisis: France Has Evacuated 21 Indians From Kabul, Says French Envoy Emmanuel Lenain.
Ramirez-Garofalo and Curley said that despite the bird being found near the Amazon facility, it could have come across the debris somewhere else.
Wood storks typically breed in Florida, Georgia and coastal South Carolina and are rarely seen as far north as New York. The species is the only stork breeding in the United States and was put on the federal endangered species list in 1984, but its status was changed to threatened in 2014.
Ciancimino, who maintains records of rare birds reported on Staten Island in the bird database eBird, said the last time a wood stork was spotted in the borough before this year was 1973. (AP)
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)