Courtesy of Peter Tan Snowmanradio, Wikimedia Commons
Pesquet's Parrot at Jurong Bird Park, Singapore. Termites can cause huge devastation to habitats, so these storks keep numbers in check. It is a little hard to find redeeming features about this bird, but we found one! They absolutely love termites, and can often be seen standing on top of the mounds feasting on the swarming insects. Ever the opportunist, they can also be seen marching up and down in front of shrub fires to prey on other animals fleeing for their lives. During breeding season, though, its tastes are somewhat elevated, and instead catches pigeon, dove, pelican and cormorant chicks to feed live to it’s young. Not fussy, it will also ransack domestic stockyards and landfill sites. Hanging out with vultures, the scavenging marabou stork dines on discarded lion-kills and other unfortunate beasts since passed on, breaking through hides with that massive bill. And with that namesake comes the character. The dark cloak-like wings, the skinny white legs, sometimes a small tuft of white hair atop the otherwise bare head, and that indomitable long, thick, sharp beak it is little wonder they are also known as undertaker birds. The appearance of this gargantuan bird cannot be understated.
The Latin name for the sac is crumeniferus, which translates as a pouch for money. This was once thought to be used for food storage, but now scientists believe it plays a part in courtship.
#Shoebill pelican skin#
They possess a large gular sac, a feature seen on many species of birds that is a featherless expanse of skin hanging from beneath the lower jaw down the neck. They do fly, and a marvellous adaptation to overcome this weight / flight conundrum is that the bones in their legs and toes are hollow, making that great skeleton a bit easier to lift. This huge sub-Saharan stork comes in at an average of 1.5m tall like our lovely shoebills, but weighs almost 9kg. This bird is so unnaturally frightening that a British author, Irvine Welsh, wrote a suitably nasty and traumatising novel called Marabou Stork Nightmares.
#Shoebill pelican series#
They are also mostly silent except for a series of staccato machine gun calls when mating, and every now and again will emit a sort of mooing noise, which suddenly makes them cute. They can live to be in their mid-thirties, can weigh up to 5kg, grow up to 1.5m tall, their feet are massive, coming in at around 18cm, and that bill can be up to 24cm long and 20cm wide, often making up a quarter of the bird’s total size. These sentient patient creatures go big in lots of ways. They have even been known to take on Nile crocodiles, and sometimes win. Shoebills are aggressive defenders of their territories, living alone, fighting alone. Eels, lungfish, snakes – anything that crosses its path, really – will be snatched at and impaled and torn. Living in the marshes of Uganda, this throwback to the dinosaurs will stand for literally hours in the same spot, quiet, blinking, waiting. The end of that wide, long plummeting facade is a sharp curved point, which is what it uses to dismember its prey. Its almost as if scientists just wanted to put it with something else to stop it being so odd.īut this bird is fascinating, and we’ve grown to love it.
It doesn’t even come in any other colour.Ĭlosely related to pelicans, this bird has been known in the past as the shoebill pelican and the shoebill stork, but those classifications have been debated or discarded along the way. It has only two very distant relatives in its lineage, examples of both found fossilised in Egypt.
It’s the whole unique otherworldliness of it, the fact that there are no other species of this bird in the galaxy. It’s not even the improbably thin legs it stalks about on. It’s not just the soul-hollowing primal, icy stare. It’s not just the enormous bill occupying practically all of its face. We’re not ranking these birds on some kind of horror scale, but this bird takes the first slot simply by the fact that it is so undeniably strange. Courtesy of Olaf Oliviero Riemer,Wikimedia Commons It’s not just the enormous bill occupying practically all of its face.
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