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Photos Confirm One Painted Stork Returned to the Same Nesting Area for Four Breeding Seasons

Painted storks at a nest in India
Research · Behaviour

A male painted stork (Mycteria leucocephala) with a distinctive throat scar was confirmed as the same individual after being photographed at the same nesting colony in Delhi, India, during four consecutive breeding seasons from 2022 to 2025. The study used the bird’s natural markings and image analysis to test whether the repeated sightings really represented one bird returning to the site.

The researchers nicknamed the bird “Ringo” and compared high-resolution photographs using image-based morphometrics, scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and deep transfer learning. SIFT identifies visual features that can be matched across photographs even when scale or viewing angle changes, while transfer learning adapts an image-recognition model that has already learned general visual patterns to a new identification task. The classifier distinguished Ringo’s left side, right side and other painted storks with about 99% accuracy. Wing-feather colour patterns were among the features that contributed strongly to the classification.

The same bird returned to the same colony each year

Ringo was recorded in each year within the same colony on the merged canopy of mesquite trees in pond 1 at Delhi Zoo. The bird did not occupy precisely the same point on the nesting substrate every year, but its repeated return to the same colony and canopy supported the authors’ conclusion that it showed a degree of nest-site fidelity.

Photography offered a non-invasive tracking method

The researchers highlight the method as a non-invasive way to follow individual colonial waterbirds without capturing, ringing or tagging them. Reliable recognition of naturally marked individuals can make it possible to study questions such as site fidelity and long-term individual histories from repeated photographs.

Sources and image credit

  1. Urfi, A. J., Mahendiran, M., Parthiban, M., & Ahmed, P. (2026). Individual identification and confirmation of nest site fidelity in painted stork (Mycteria leucocephala) using deep transfer learning. Royal Society Open Science, 13, 251083. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251083Primary peer-reviewed study. A scar-marked male Painted Stork photographed at Delhi Zoo in 2022–2025 was confirmed as the same individual using morphometrics, SIFT and deep transfer learning. The classifier reached 98.92% validation accuracy and 98.71% test accuracy. Repeated use of the same colony and merged mesquite canopy supported evidence of nest-site fidelity.

Image: Vasudevan Nishanth / Wikimedia Commons — painted storks (Mycteria leucocephala) at a nest in Koonthankulam, Tamil Nadu, India, 17 December 2015. Illustrative photograph, not Ringo or birds from the Delhi study. CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

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