Oriental Stork in Ulsan, September 9

Bird News by Johan Kok

At 22:22 on Tuesday 8 September 2015 I received text messages indicating that a single Oriental Stork had been seen in the Taehwa river in Ulsan on the 7th of September by Adrian Boyle.  It’s not every day that such a rare bird turns up near your house.  Armed with the details of the sighting on the 7th I headed out straight after work today (9 September) to see if I could relocate the bird.

The directions were good and fortunately the bird was still there.  It was indeed an Oriental Stork.  Initial sightings were very distant and against the setting sun.  After I moved to get a little closer and position the sun behind me I managed to get some great views, though still fairly distant.  I took a number of photos with a DSLR and high quality 400mm zoom lens.  After zooming in on the photos I noticed that the bird was color banded.  It was not possible to see the bands very well with only binoculars since the bird was moving most of the time.

From the blown up (heavily cropped) photos below it looks like the bands are: Right Leg – Black over Blue; Left Leg – Blue over Green.  Hopefully the bands will give us some information about the origin and movement of the bird.  What a fantastic sighting! Thanks to Adrian Boyle!

Oriental White Stork 3

Oriental White Stork 2

Oriental stork Ciconia boyciana by Johan Kok

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