Wood stork rookery
— a slow bird coming back, one nest at a time.
Not only on a wall.
Wood stork rookery, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Wood storks nest high in old bald cypress, sometimes a hundred pairs to a single stand of trees. They come back to the same colonies year after year, timed to the dry-down when shrinking pools concentrate fish into easy reach of a stork's bill. The adults stand four feet tall, with bare grey heads and a wingspan over five feet. From below it is mostly the sound: a soft clatter of beaks, the rush of wings, the slow turn of a wading bird back to its own tree. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The wood stork (Mycteria americana) is the only stork that breeds in the United States, and Florida holds the largest share of the national population. Colonies, called rookeries, cluster nests high in mature bald cypress or mangroves above standing water, which discourages raccoons and rat snakes from climbing up. Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, an Audubon preserve in Collier County, has historically hosted one of the largest wood-stork colonies in the country, with peaks above 6,000 nesting pairs. The species was downlisted from endangered to threatened in 2014 under the Endangered Species Act.
Wood storks are tactile feeders. They wade with the bill held open in the water and snap it closed in about 25 milliseconds when a fish brushes the inside, one of the fastest reflexes measured in any vertebrate. That hunting style only works when fish are dense, so the birds time nesting to Florida's winter dry-down, when wetlands shrink and stranded fish concentrate. A failed dry-down — too much rain, or water held high by management — means abandoned nests. Healthy years in the Everglades and the Big Cypress watershed remain the strongest signal that South Florida's hydrology is working.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, near Naples, runs a 2.25-mile boardwalk through the old-growth cypress where the colony nests, and the season runs roughly January through April when the storks are on eggs and chicks. The sanctuary opens at 7 a.m. for early-morning light and quiet. Other reliable colonies include the Tampa Bay rookery islands and several sites within Everglades National Park. Most public rookeries ask visitors to stay on the boardwalk and lower their voices: stress causes adults to lift off the nest, which exposes eggs and chicks.
