Southern Ground Hornbill

Southern Ground Hornbill battle analysis

The southern ground hornbill hunts on foot. A family group of up to about a dozen birds walks slowly across the grass, spending most of the day on the move and sometimes covering more than 10 km. When one bird finds something, a snake, a tortoise, a nest of chicks or a hiding mongoose, it can call the others with a low bark, and the group's heavy bills do the rest.

Its life is built around the group. Every breeding pair depends on helpers, and birds without years of experience as helpers fail to raise young. Chicks stay dependent for up to two years, and a group raises only about one chick every three years. In experiments, ground hornbills learned new foraging tricks by watching group members and adjusted to changing reward rules, evidence of solid, socially based learning.

In an absolute matchup, the hornbill is a 4 kg bird whose weapon is its bill. It has no talons, no kicking attack like the secretary bird, and no burst speed. It does well against snakes, reptiles and small mammals on open ground, but faster predators and anything larger than a mongoose can simply stay out of bill range.

Habitat & range

The southern ground hornbill lives from Kenya, Burundi and the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo south through Angola, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique and northern Namibia to northern and eastern South Africa, where it is widespread but scarce. It prefers grassland and savanna woodland with a sparse understory, from montane grassland to mopane and teak woodland. In South Africa it is now largely confined to reserves and national parks such as Kruger, where GPS-tracked groups favored grassland, open woodland and dense thicket for foraging.

Diet & hunting

It is carnivorous, eating mainly insects such as grasshoppers and beetles plus frogs, snakes, lizards, chameleons, tortoises, mongooses, squirrels, young hares and nestling birds. It rarely drinks. As a large ground predator it is treated as an apex predator of the savanna ground layer, and its huge territories mean that protecting one group also protects many other species.

Social life

Groups of about 2–11 birds share a territory, with one dominant breeding pair and helpers that are usually adult males or young from earlier seasons. Groups keep contact with loud chorus calls heard up to 3 km away and defend territories of up to about 100 km².

Conservation

The species is listed as Vulnerable globally and Endangered in South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho and Eswatini. Threats include loss of big nest trees and habitat, poisoning, persecution (including for breaking windows), hunting and use in traditional medicine. Conservation programs rear the redundant second chick in captivity and reintroduce groups into former range. Hot, dry weather is linked with worse breeding results.

Quick answers