survived, also hatched at Discovery Island at Disneyland Florida Resort in 1991. The parents were at least 18 years old when they first bred. In the wild, the maguari stork is considered a game bird in Amazonia. Status The maguari stork is evaluated as being of least concern because it has an extremely large geographical range, and an apparently stable world population that is suspected to be very large. Despite local declines in some parts of its range, the population is not considered to be threatened on a global scale. However, even though this stork appears to be numerous throughout its natural habitat, census data are lacking and there appears to be no current estimate of the world population. This should be a new target of conservationists, and a clearer overview of this stork's world status could be aided by carrying out numerous aerial surveys of nesting areas. This stork may be especially vulnerable in the llanos of Venezuela. Its population declined strongly there in recent past decades as of 1977 and less than 5000 individuals were estimated to live in this region through most of the 1980s. A potentially effective conservation strategy to help protect this stork's natural habitat in the llanos is the expansion and maintenance of cattle ranches in the savanna grassland matrix in preference to crop cultivation, since such ranches are similar in vegetational structure to natural grasslands. Another potentially useful conservation measure is the deployment of artificial nesting platforms to encourage nesting of maguari storks, as has been done for the white stork in Europe. Despite its relatively unthreatened overall status, the maguari stork should deserve closer global population monitoring to better safeguard it from future potential large-scale declines across its entire range. References maguari stork Birds of South America maguari stork maguari stork Taxonomy articles created by Polbot