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Hornbill

Redirected from Bucerotidae

Hornbills
Hornbill.jpg
Abbysinian Ground Hornbill
Bucorvus abbysinicus
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Coraciiformes
Family: Bucerotidae
Genera
Hornbills (Family Bucerotidae) are a group of birds whose bill is shaped like a cow's horn, but without a twist, and with a casque on the upper bill. Both the English and scientific names refer to the shape of the bill, "Buceros" being "cow horn" in Greek.

There are about 40 species of hornbill in the Old World tropics.

Hornbills could well be called "jailbirds" because of their rearing habits. They build a nest in a hollow part of a tree, where the female lays up to six white eggs.

Before the eggs hatch, the male builds a wall in the opening, leaving only a small hole through which the male transfers food to the mother and the chicks. When the chicks and the female are too big to fit in the nest, the mother breaks out and rebuilds the wall, then both parents feed the chicks.

Many, but not all, hornbills have an enlarged horny casque at the top of their bills. Most are arboreal birds of dense forest, but the large Ground Hornbills, as their name implies, are terrestrial birds of open savannah.

Hornbills are omnivorous, eating fruit, insects and small animals.

In the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, Hornbills are separated from the Coraciiformes, which also includes kingfishers, bee-eaters and rollers as a separate order Bucerotiformes.

Some species have different plumages for each sex. The blue throat of the Abbysinian Ground Hornbill pictured above shows it to be an adult female.

A more typical hornbill species is shown below.

Redbilledhornbill129.jpg

Red-billed Hornbill
Tockus erythrorhychus

Species list

wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump