Yellow-Billed Hornbill

Amazing Facts About the Yellow-Billed Hornbill

• The Yellow-Billed Hornbill is widespread across South Africa, including in Kruger National Park.
• They are distinguished by their very large, downwardly curved yellow beaks.
• They feed mainly on the ground, foraging for seeds, insects, spiders and even scorpions. They may catch snakes, which they kill by bashing them on against a hard surface. They swallow their prey whole, letting indeigestable parts pass through their digestive system.
• Yellow-Billed Hornbills are known to forage co-operatively with Dwarf Mongooses, catching prey items that the mongooses scratch up from the ground. In return, the hornbills alert the mongooses to danger from overhead raptors.
• There have been reports of hornbills waiting expectantly at mongoose burrows, eager for the foraging to begin.
• The Yellow Billed Hornbill has a very distinctive clucking call. Once one bird starts calling, the whole group will often join in, creating a cacophony of sound.

• In their territory in Southern Africa you will often see two hornbills sitting together, clucking away with their wings spred out, moving back and forth and bowing their heads in display.
• The bird can be solitary but are also found in pairs or small groups.
• They are active during the day, but mostly at dawn and dusk. They roost high in trees during the night.
• Yellow-Billed Hornbills nest in holes in trees. They line the cavity with dry grasses and leaves.
• Breeding season is September to March (mainly October/November). The females seal themselves and their eggs inside their hollows with mud and saliva.
• Females will lay 3 to 5 eggs.  The eggs usually take about 24 days to incubate and are tended to by the female, not the male.
• About 20 days after the first egg hatches, the female breaks out of the nest and partly seals the entrance again – a small hole is left open through which the young are fed – after a further 22 to 27 days the young birds break out of the nest.