Behaviour
The courtship and bonding of these birds are critical, as the female must trust the male to provide her with everything when she is incubating and raising chicks. These hornbills lay their eggs inside tree trunks and the female stays inside with the eggs and then with the chicks, while the male brings them food. After the eggs are laid, the male collects mud and the pair pack that mud, along with food and feces, to wall up the tree cavity entrance. This creates a very small hole, only large enough for the male to feed the female (and later chicks) and for the female to defecate out the hole. Once the babies are fully feathered and old enough to leave the nest, the parents chip away the dry mud so the chicks can get out.
The Rhinoceros Hornbill eats fruit, insects, small reptiles, rodents and smaller birds.
Read more about this topic: Rhinoceros Hornbill
Famous quotes containing the word behaviour:
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)