The Southern Ground Hornbill
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The Southern Ground Hornbill
Welcome to view the Southern Ground Hornbill, a bird that is capable of applying makeup! Its bill is often stained orange and sometimes reddish-yellow. The bird obtains the stain when it preens oil from a base gland located close to its tail. In addition, this hornbill makes an extremely deep and booming shriek, which may be audible to a person as far as 5 kilometers. The shriek does not indicate the bird is about to attack so do not seek anybody's help if it starts shrieking. Rather, the bird might be communicating with fellow hornbills in adjacent cages or simply passing time.
You will definitely admire the beauty of this bird. The dark eyes, a virtually comically enormous, rounded bill, and long eyelashes will be enjoyable to view. The size of the bird may range from that of a young pigeon to as huge as 1.8 meters long. You will be able to pick out the hornbill easily from the other caged birds because it has a unique part atop its bill known as a casque. To add onto its pretty features, this hornbill has a large tail, broad span of wings, as well as brown, gray, white, or black feathers. You will find these colors in this species only, and you will easily notice the contrast it has with the red colored face, neck, and bill of several other species. Bee-eaters, kingfishers, as well as rollers have been considered distant cousins of the Southern Ground Hornbill, though there are great color variations between the two groups of birds.
The scientific name of this bird is Bucorvus leadbeater. Among all the species of the ground-hornbill, it weighs and grows the largest. The bird is quite gigantic; it has a length of approximately 51 inches and a width of 36 inches. The weight may range between 3.0 to 5.9 kilograms. Normally, the male bird is significantly larger compared to the female one. Both sexes possess a characteristic dark coloration. Apart from the size, you can tell the male because its face and throat contain vivid cherry red skin patches. These patches may be greenish-yellow in a juvenile male. Another diagnostic characteristic of the male bird is the tip that shows white whenever the bird is on a flight. The black beak and the straightness of the bill present a large casque, which is apparently less developed in females than in males. If you notice some bluish-violet areas with bare skin on the throat of the bird, it is likely to be a juvenile male regardless of how enormous it may look (Likoff, 2010).
The habitat of the ground bill consists of grassland savannahs and woodlands. Birds that have not found custody in the Houston Zoo or any other zoo will be found wondering wildly in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, and sometimes Burundi. Environmentalists, however, prefer to have these rare species confined and preserved in either a national reserve or a zoo. If it were in the bush, you would not find a hornbill staying alone; they like to be cliques of 6 to 15 birds. The group may comprise both juveniles and adults. Aerial pursuits are bound to occur between various cliques. The hornbill enjoys foraging on the ground when it feeds leisurely on frogs, insects, snails, mammals like hares, as well as small reptiles. Nonetheless, juveniles are not able to forage and depend on their mothers for feeding needs up to the age of 8 months.
Traditionally, people used to treat the Southern Ground Hornbill well; they regarded it with respect because they considered it sacred. Consequently, this hornbill used to thrive with virtually no molestation from man. Today, however, this highly intelligent and charismatic bird is quite endangered. The principal threat it faces is habitat loss due to rapid deforestation. The species needs very tall trees suitable for nesting purposes and avoid secondary poisoning. Worse still, the bird usually breeds at over 8 years of age and is able to raise only one offspring every 10 years on average. Although it usually lays 2 eggs, it is able to hatch only one. Houston Zoo, through its partnership project dubbed the Mabula Project of Hornbill Conservation, is working hard to hunt down and protect this species at Houston Zoo. Mabula Project of Hornbill Conservation manager, Kate Meares, has explained they observe nests where the reserved bird hides carefully after which they collect only the second chick to rear by hand. They do this only if the other chick is apparently healthy. These chicks are often collected from Mpumalanga Park and sometimes Kruger Association Nature. Transport is done in polystyrene boxes the same day, into the caring custody of a curator of hornbills at Houston Zoo.
In conclusion, the Southern Hornbill is a bird most visitors at Houston Zoo regard as pretty. Apart from the beautifully colored patches of skin, its ability to do make ups, and the sharp differences between the male and female birds, you will like watching some mannerisms of the bird such as the pride with which it walks as well as the shrieking.