Wife-incarceration: To keep her safe and sound

was suddenly woken by a great commotion. A flurry of wings and an ear-splitting shriek broke the morning silence. tray with mugs of coffee crashed to the floor. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed the little hornbill.
Issue date : 10 October 2008

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I was suddenly woken by a great commotion. A flurry of wings and an ear-splitting shriek broke the morning silence. tray with mugs of coffee crashed to the floor. I scrambled out of bed and grabbed the little hornbill. With all the strength in my remaining fingers I forced the enormously powerful talons of the black sparrowhawk open. My wife snatched the hornbill away and ran sobbing with it to the kitchen. But it was too late. Its back was broken and its legs paralysed.

This tragedy happened early one morning when I was still half-asleep on our gauze-enclosed verandah. In front of my bed a big female black sparrowhawk, which I used for falconry, sat on her perch. When my wife brought me my morning coffee, she didn’t notice that the young yellow-billed hornbill that at the time lived free in our house and garden, was following her. It was pounced upon by the hawk. his had all started some months earlier when one of my game guards had confiscated the hornbill, as a little chick, from a boy who’d tried to sell it illegally on the side of the road. I had wanted them to return it to its nest, but the guard pointed out that now that the location of the nest was known, it would be removed again. Although I knew little about raising a hornbill, I agreed against my better judgment to keep the chick. I named him Koerie and placed him on rags in a basket.

He had no feathers and was still covered in short quills which gave him the appearance of a long-snouted hedgehog. As I expected, he refused to eat even the juiciest grasshopper or caterpillar I offered him. In fact, he just sat huddled up with his eyes closed. I gave him little chance of surviving. Then I thought about how it worked in nature and took an empty shoe-box, cut a slit into one side and placed the little bird inside. It worked. Dangling a grasshopper in front of the slit brought immediate response. The tip of a little bill came through the slit and grabbed the insect. He fed voraciously, but got so excited inside the box he kept knocking the lid off. As soon as he was exposed, he withdrew and sulked. When he defecated he did it neatly through the slit, but the edges were sometimes soiled and it made the box wet, so I decided to let him build his own nest. In my office was a “pigeon-hole” cabinet and I placed him in the bottom row with a container full of mud.

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He immediately knew what to do. He took beakfuls of mud and started to paste it against the front wooden edges of his compartment. Using his flattened bill as a trowel he skillfully pasted mud into a compact, solid barricade. He worked tirelessly and I worried that he didn’t eat. When I offered him a grasshopper, he accepted, but didn’t eat it, instead weaving it into the mud to strengthen his wall. He did the same with the straw and grass I gave him. Eventually he had a narrow slit left through which he fed eagerly.

Finding freedom bout a month later
Koerie started to chip away his barricade and emerged as a beautiful little hornbill. He immediately flew well and followed me home. He became a darling in the house, but because I wanted eventually to set him free, we took him for walks in the bush and often left him outside. He could be very naughty and often stole the earrings off visiting ladies and dropped them behind the cupboards, or pulled my wife’s needle out of her knitting and flew away with it. We hoped that once he matured he would find a mate and would go off to live a normal life, but it was not to be.

The tragedy was the end of little Koerie. his was one of the first close contacts I had with a hornbill, which is one of the strangest birds in the bush. Even its name is somewhat queer. The design of a hornbill is quite crazy and seems to have been thought up in Disneyland. An enormous bill, long tail and very short legs just don’t seem to fit together. The long tail would be a serious hindrance for a bird that lives for a long time in a cramped nest hole. tail joint of a hornbill is, however, very flexible and when in the nest they fold their tails over their heads, flat against their backs. he long curved bill seems to present a bigger problem. It makes it impossible for the hornbill to eat like other birds. When it picks up a piece of food with the tip of its long bill, its rather short tongue can’t reach it. It has to toss its head back and flip the food accurately down its throat.

They are very skilled at it and I’ve never seen them drop anything. The downward curve of the bill also makes it impossible for them to drink. If they were to dip their bills in water like chickens, all the water would run out instead of down their throats. Their short legs also make it impossible for them to get into the water deep enough to suck it up like doves. The result? Hornbills never drink. With a diet of mostly fruit or insects they don’t have to, because their food contains sufficient moisture for their needs. Being birds, they use water economically as they never sweat or urinate. Uric acid is excreted as a little white blob on their faeces.

A niche
The wide distribution and long fossil history of hornbills is, however, ample proof that theirs is a successful design. They not only occur from South Africa through the rest of the continent south of the Sahara and from India to the Philippines, but their design has been closely copied by the toucans of South America. These birds are unrelated but remarkably similar to hornbills, which are strangely absent from Madagascar. Recently, our grey hornbill has even extended its range into the highveld, by utilising the artificial forests created in towns and cities. Another strange thing about hornbills is the astonishing diversity of the sounds they produce that range from the deep booming call of the ground hornbill, sounding like a fat ghost in a graveyard, to the angel-like piping whistle of the grey hornbill.

Then there’s the harsh kokok, kokok of the common yellow- and red-billed hornbill or the plaintive wailing of the true forest-living trumpeter hornbill. A most remarkable aspect of hornbill behaviour is their breeding habits. For the whole incubation period, as well as a considerable time after the chicks have hatched, the female is incarcerated in a nest hole in the same way as Koerie was. Most species utilise a hole in a hollow tree, but Bradfield’s hornbill in Namibia usually uses a rock crevice. Although the large turkey-sized ground hornbill uses large cavities in trees, the female is never plastered in. In most species the female performs the imprisonment herself, but in others she’s assisted by the male, which then collects and passes food required for the family through the slit.

Before the eggs hatch the female eats all the food and becomes extremely fat, doubling her body weight. She also moults all her tail and flight feathers. As soon as the first chick hatches the female stops eating entirely and feeds all the food to the chicks. She then grows new feathers and lives on fat reserves for about three weeks before emerging quite thin, but newly dressed.

A herd of birds
Of all hornbills, the ground hornbill is the biggest. It’s a remarkable bird, living in groups, of which only the dominant pair breed, while the whole group collects food for the chicks. Unlike our other species which are plentiful in all bushveld areas, ground hornbill numbers are in rapid decline. The main causes seem to be bush-encroachment in the bushveld and forestation on the escarpment, adversely altering the habitat, as well as poisoning, and increasing demand by city dwellers for hardwood, destroying nest-trees. So, next time you braai with the wrong wood, you could just as well be cooking a bromvoël. – Abré J Steyn Contact Abré J Steyn on 083 235 4822 or (015) 793 1356 or e-mail [email protected]. |fw