African Pied Hornbill, Tockus fasciatus, is a hornbill. Hornbills are a family of tropical near-passerine birds found in the Old World.
African Pied Hornbill is a common resident breeder in much of equatorial Africa from The Gambia to western Uganda and northern Angola. This is a bird mainly of forest habitats. The female lays up to four white eggs in a tree hole, which is blocked off during incubation with a cement made of mud, droppings and fruit pulp. There is only one narrow aperture, just big enough for the male to transfer food to the mother and the chicks.
Read more about African Pied Hornbill: Morphology, Behaviour
Famous quotes containing the word african:
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)