EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

White Stork on Nest

White Stork (Ciconia ciconia), Family Ciconiidae
Algiers, Algeria, North Africa

Explanation:  They are not particularly abundant, but are surely quite visible for their large size and prominent nest positions.  This is a White Stork, here in North Africa, along the Mediterranean Sea.  

This is an adult, likely a female tending to unseen eggs or young; male and female adults have the same plumage, so you can't tell them apart that way.   Adults are very much white, with black wings, whereas juveniles have dull red bills and legs, and wings are dark brown.  

But ... what is that gray smudge on this bird's neck and chest?  There are no descriptions of this being a color variation, so I surmise that this bird got simply into some muddy parts of some marshland or meadow, or perhaps one of the many, extensive trash dump sites in the region, and carried it back to the nest (see Information, further below).
   

In another nest near the main one, above, here in Algiers, Algeria,
sat an adult pair of White Storks, again likely watching over 
some unseen eggs or young.

White Storks select nest sites in some rather remarkable sites, such as this one atop a massively tall power pole, now here in Testour, in north-central Tunisia, in North Africa: 

IUCN Red List marks White Storks as "Least Concern," with populations actually increasing, even though threats continue, including drainage of their wet-meadow habitats, collision with power lines (the nest in the above photo seems like a candidate, eh?), and use for sport hunting, specimen collecting, and the pet trade, and even use as food.

And even isolated nest-site locations may not be free from human intervention.   On the northeast coast of Tunisia, in the town of Hammamet, I discovered this White Stork nest in potential double-trouble from the live power lines and from a massive sheet of plastic that had wafted onto the side of its nest:

Even in the finest of coastal sea locations, this species has to beware of human interference!

Information:
    Jagiello, Z., A. López-García, J.I. Aguirre, and Ł. Dylewski.  2020.  Distance to landfill and human activities affects the debris incorporation into the white stork nests in urbanized landscape in central Spain.  Environmental Science and Pollution Research 27(24):30893–30898. doi: 10.1007/s11356-020-09621-3.