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Species of bird

The Asian woolly necked stork or Asian woollyneck (Ciconia episcopus) is a species of large wading bird in the stork family Ciconiidae. It breeds singly, or in small loose colonies. It is distributed in a wide variety of habitats including marshes in forests, agricultural areas, and freshwater wetlands across Asia.

The woolly necked stork was described by the French polymath Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected from the Coromandel Coast of India. The bird was also illustrated in a hand coloured plate engraved by François Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Ardea episcopus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The woolly necked stork is now placed in the genus Ciconia that was erected by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760. The genus name Ciconia is the Latin word for a "stork"; the specific epithet episcopus is Latin for "bishop". Two subspecies are recognised: with the remaining two subspecies becoming the Asian woolly necked stork. The Handbook and other sources of taxonomic lists use geographical separation as the sole basis for elevating the three subspecies into two species, and this assumption requires to be tested using more definitive methods such as genetics.

The woolly necked stork is a medium sized stork at 75–92 cm tall. The iris is deep crimson or wine red. The stork is glistening black overall with a black "skull cap", a downy white neck which gives it its name. The lower belly and under tail coverts are white, standing out from the rest of the dark coloured plumage. Feathers on the fore neck are iridescent with a coppery purple tinge. These feathers are elongated and can be erected during displays. The tail is deeply forked and is white, usually covered by the black long under tail coverts. It has long red legs and a heavy, blackish bill, though some specimens have largely dark red bills with only the basal one third being black. Sexes are alike. Juvenile birds are duller versions of the adult with a feathered forehead that is sometimes streaked black and white. Small nestlings are pale grey with buffy down on the neck, and a black crown. At fledging age, the immature bird is identical to the adult except for a feathered forehead, much lesser iridescence on feathers, and much longer and fluffier feathers on the neck. Newly fledged young have a prominent white mark in the center of the forehead that can be used to distinguish young of the year. but there is no morphological or phylogenetic evidence yet to support this split. They use a variety of freshwater wetlands including seasonal and perennial reservoirs and marshes, crop lands, irrigation canals and rivers, but are mostly seen in agricultural areas and in wetlands outside protected areas across south Asia and Myanmar. They are attracted to fires in grasslands and crop fields where they capture insects trying to escape the fire. Across south Asia, Asian woolly necked storks largely use agricultural landscapes with more numbers seen using unprotected wetlands relative to the amount of wetlands on the landscape, and a majority of individuals use agricultural crops. In Haryana, north India, they nest on trees planted along crop fields and irrigation canals as part of traditional multifunctional agroforestry and generally avoid trees close to human settlements. and 3,540 m above sea level in Nepal (Annapurna Conservation Area).

Several calls by adult birds have been described including bisyllabic whistles given along with displays at the nest, and a fierce hissing sound when a bird was attacked by a trained falcon. Adult birds have also been observed diving from nests before flying away abruptly in a 'bat like flight'. These two observations suggest that Asian woolly necked storks preferred drier crops as foraging habitats, and its foraging efficiency improved in less wet crops. Additionally, storks in Nepal did not alter behaviors from foraging to the energy expending alert behaviors when they were close to farmers, though time spent being alert reduced considerably while foraging in wetland habitats. Birds use both forest trees and scattered trees in agricultural areas to build nests. Riverside cliffs are occasionally used for nesting. Asian woolly necked stork nests in Haryana were preferentially reused by dusky eagle owls Bubo coromandus over other large nests made by other bird species in the area. It seems likely that Asian woolly necked storks support the well being of many other species, including large raptors such as dusky eagle owls, via commensal and other inter species relationships associated with their nests.

The species was elevated from "Near threatened" to "Vulnerable" in 2014 based on anecdotal reports of deforestation in south east Asia potentially leading to catastrophic population declines with the assumption that the species required protected wetlands inside forested reserves. These variations may have been due to differences in count methods and season making it difficult to know if population sizes of this species has changed along the River Mekong. Modeled distributions of woolly necked storks strongly overlapped forested reserves in south east Asia suggesting low ability to survive outside forests in stark contrast to the situation in south Asia and Myanmar. The majority of the protected reserve forests and wetlands in south east Asia are under threat suggesting that woolly necked storks face an uncertain future in this region.