Hornbills

Hornbills are large, impressive birds with some serious adornments to their thick decurved bills. There are eight species of hornbill in Borneo and the blurb of travel websites and brochures teasingly speculate that you might stand a chance of seeing them all. It’s good PR, but my friends, we know its not that easy. Nothing relating to nature ever is.

However, whilst sweating around the Rainforest Discovery Centre at Sepilok for 3 hours or more at the beginning of the Bornean leg of this epic trek clockwise around the globe, we did find a solitary Black Hornbill croaking away at the top of a tree along one of the trails. An impressive enough bird and a welcome tick, because forest birding is hard work, especially when on your own in a foreign land, completely ignorant of calls and likely habitat. We were happy with this self located bruiser of a bird. One in the bag.

We move onto Sukau, where during the morning and afternoon boat tours, we manage to see Oriental Pied Hornbill from time to time floating across the river, as well as some Wrinkled Hornbills perched in tall trees. Further, as dusk was throwing the shadows of wayside vegetation across a tributary one evening, a trio of Bushy-crested Hornbills filed across the brooding sky directly above us (no picture). Of course this didn’t register as particularly noteworthy by anyone else, but it translated as four of eight for us – getting interesting.

Our final location was at Tabin, surrounded by wonderfully lush primary forest, where, as already documented, Rhinoceros Hornbills stole the early morning show. A daytime drive through the forest resulted in a frustrating episode of hearing a distant Helmeted Hornbill with its slow paced, evenly spaced, hoot speeding up before culminating in a finale of what sounds like maniacal laughing – but no actual sighting. The session therefore ended on five and a half (if you count hearing the bird as half – which we all surely do) out of eight. Could our final evening drive produce anything more?

This is where the lighthearted, “we’ll never do it” quest became a touch more serious. Half way through the late drive, Denise spotted three distant large birds flying high over the forest, but coming in our direction. To our mutual delight, that is including our young guide, they turned out to be Wreathed Hornbills. Ok, now it’s getting real. 

As dusk was falling and visibility very poor, a flash of white in a roadside bush, coincidental with an excited exclamation from our guide, revealed a trio of White-crowned Hornbills that entertained us for a few minutes as darkness quickly fell. Such beautiful creatures, and amazingly I managed to reel off a few shots of one of them. So good to have a record, however ropey, of the moment. This took us to seven and a half out of eight. Surely a remarkably lucky situation. We have one more day to complete the set…..even our guide is getting wrapped up in it all. Will we do it? Tune in later for the next episode.