Wildlife Window: The wood stork stood out like the celebrity it is

I had to go a second time because my first visit to see the wood stork in Broomfield was so wonderfully rewarding.

As a boy in Iowa, I saved money to buy bird books; and those bird books alerted me to the world’s great diversity of birds. Ornithologists now classify 19 stork species into a discrete order and family of their own. Four storks are closely related with the wood stork in the Americas, a sibling species in Africa and two other sibling species in Asia.

A denizen of swamps and related wetlands, the wood stork had no opportunity, then or now, to inhabit swampless Iowa. However, birds do wander, a behavior that takes them to unexpected places, which intensifies the recreational fun of birding. Wandering recently brought a wood stork to a pond in Broomfield where it became a magnet