Scientific name: Mycteria cinerea (Raffles, 1822).
In the South-East Asian region, the milky stork is widely but very patchily distributed, with only 6,100 birds counted in a 1994 survey by Birdlife International,
a global alliance of national conservation organisations. Indonesia has the highest number at 6,000, scattered through its wetlands on the East Coast of
Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi; Cambodia and Malaysia account for the remaining 100. As the birds reside in the region’s marshes, mudflats, mangrove forests,
and rice fields, they are highly vulnerable to extinction because these habitats are the very ones that governments in the region are furiously developing and
draining, and fatally changing. The bird is currently categorised as vulnerable in the World Conservation Union’s Red Data Book that lists all species
vulnerable to, or more severely threatened by, extinction.