Wood Storks are very large birds, and as a result, flight is energetically costly (remember, there are good reasons heavy animals like humans cannot fly!). Yet storks can travel long distances and do so daily during the breeding season to get food. This is possible because storks are very good at soaring, holding their wings straight out and using rising air masses (thermals) to carry them aloft, often to over one thousand meters in altitude. Storks can then move laterally by moving from thermal to thermal, and once up high, can glide slowly downwards to distant foraging or roosting sites.

The use of static-soaring is essentially the same technique used by gliders, and allows storks to travel long distances without using much energy. For example, in a different species, Herring Gulls, soaring birds have a lower heart rate than gulls sitting on a beach. In storks, the energy expended in soaring is only about 12% of the energy expended in flapping flight. Storks often forage far from their breeding colonies, and one-way distances of 60 km are common. This means that storks can have access to a very broad range of possible foraging sites from any single colony site. This also means they do not necessarily have to move their colony sites as food sources shift from year to year, and so stork colonies tend to be fairly stable in location from year to year.

When flying from colonies to foraging areas, storks travel at between 25 and 35 km/hour, depending in large part on whether they are flapping in a direct line, or soaring in circles towards their destinations.