Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Only a handful of bar-pouched wreathed hornbills live in the United States, and two of them reside right here in Jefferson County. This species (Rhyticeros undulatus) is endangered in their wild habitat in Southeast Asia, but those that live in facilities in the U.S. may be able to help their kind avoid extinction. The North Florida Wildlife Center (NFWC) in Lamont is one such facility. It has been home to a female bar-pouched wreathed hornbill named Seza for three years.
“We've been waiting very patiently for a male to become available to pair her up with,” says Ryan Reines, director of NFWC, “but these birds are incredibly difficult to come by.”
Excitement was high, therefore, when Seze's potential mate finally arrived on Tuesday, Oct. 4! The NFWC staff have affectionately named him Toruk Makto, after the red dragon character in the Avatar movie.
“He is going to be 14 next year, and he came out of a zoo in California,” explains Reines. “Unfortunately, his mate passed away of cancer. Birds get cancer, too, and so he became a single male. We had a single female, probably the only single female in the United States, so we finally get the chance to pair these guys up. It is nothing short of an incredible opportunity for us.”
The process for breeding Toruk Makto and Seze began with simply putting them in separate but adjacent enclosures where they could hear and glimpse each other through slits in the wooden siding. Visitors on Toruk Makto's arrival date could easily see that the pair were quickly taking a keen interest in each other. They signaled each other with sounds, repeatedly peeked through the wall, touched bills through the siding gaps and even fed each other.
Reines says that it is very important for NFWC to make absolutely sure before they take the wall down that the two birds are getting along well. The center expected to give the birds a shared enclosure as early as Monday, Oct. 10. The next step will be to move them together into an even larger habitat. The center is working very hard to secure the needed funds to construct a huge aviary in a forested area of their 11-acre property that would allow the birds to fly among the trees in a natural habitat. Such a setting would provide conditions conducive to breeding.
Once the hopefully happy couple is ready to mate, they will next select a hollow in a tree to be their nursery, says Reines.
“The female will enter this cavity, and they will seal the female inside this nest cavity, leaving only a hole large enough for the male to pass food through. She will lay her eggs in there, usually one to four eggs, and she will raise her young in there. Once they are ready to fly, they will break out of the cavity.”
While on the nest with her eggs and chicks, a female hornbill enters a kind of vegetative, robotic state of mind that allows her to remain in the cavity for about four months. This approach helps protect the brood from predators. In the wild, however, other threats have caused these hornbills to become endangered. Logging and forest fragmentation have depleted the habitat they need to make their nests to begin with. Additional threats include illegal poaching for meat, feathers, chicks and the ivory trade.
Efforts like those underway at NFWC can help the bar-pouched wreathed hornbills remain viable in our world.
NFWC “is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that strives for the highest standards of animal care, education, conservation, environmental service, and operations. The NFWC is active in education initiatives, breeding programs, and ecosystem recovery around the world, as well as in its own community. The NFWC has been a top attraction in North Florida since its opening in 2019.”
Entrance fees paid by those who visit help NFWC continue its mission and support conservation projects around the world that protect critical habitats and save endangered species. For example, in connection with the hornbills living at NFWC, the center supports Planet Indonesia, a conservation group that works in hornbills' natural habitat areas to protect at-risk ecosystems through community-led partnerships that address rural poverty, gender inequality and food security. To plan a tour, field trip or animal encounter at NFWC, visit northfloridawildlife.org.
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