yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Ivory-Like "Helmets" Are Driving These Birds to Extinction | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Among homegirls in the world, the helmet of hornbill is the most unique species. The only hundred species who has a solid cusp features has been recognized for its ivory light quality. Well, we know that it just lives in the old ancient Sunday forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, but it lives only in the lowland areas of the forest. It nests in very big old trees.

It's the largest flying bird pretty much in the whole of these forests, and when you have big birds like that, they usually have highly specific habitat requirements. These birds live on fruits; they eat animals, but when they eat vegetables, they only eat fruits. Then they nest in holes in big, big old trees. These trees are going to be some of the big old Giants of the forest, and these are the ones that get felled first.

The helmeted hornbill has a very slow reproductive rate, which is typical of old birds living in old forests. So, for example, the female actually walls herself inside the nest hole with the young for a hundred and sixty days. That's almost half a year! So this is a very slow rate of reproduction—only one young a year at the very best.

We know the population is in steep decline, and where it used to be quite a common bird, now people visiting forests for bird-watching or biologists doing monitoring say it has become extremely rare. This is in just five years, or maybe even just three years.

This extraordinary phenomenon occurred in late 2012 when I received photos of helmeted hornbills in the black market. This shocked me. Since then, I started my investigation projects in 2013 in West Kalimantan. My worries have been proven; at least 500 adult helmeted hornbills were killed each month in West Kalimantan. This sums up to about six thousand helmeted hornbills killed each year.

Din is suspected of being a major kingpin in the illicit ivory trade. So you don't make much money in the timber business, but you have one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars in cash.

More Articles

View All
How Lasers Work (in practice) - Smarter Every Day 33
Hey it’s me, Destin. Welcome to Smarter Every Day. So I’m in the Netherlands today and I’m hanging out with a buddy of mine that I met through a research project. His name is Johan Kr… Reinink. That. So, anyway, Johan is a laser expert, and I’ve worked…
Mercury 101 | National Geographic
[Narrator] The planet Mercury is named after the messenger of the Roman gods, because even the ancients could see how swift and fleeting it is in the sky. But it wasn’t until recently that scientists began unraveling Mercury’s many mysteries. Mercury is…
What is Origins? - Behind the Scenes | Origins: The Journey of Humankind
I want to take people out of their heads. I want origins to inject people with a sense of wonder. Origins is the journey of humankind. It’s basically a show that reinvents the sort of historical epic from a modern perspective. So, through a modern lens, …
Pangolins: The Most Trafficked Mammal You've Never Heard Of | National Geographic
[Music] The world’s most trafficked mammal is one you may have never even heard of: the pangolin. Despite its lizard-like appearance, the pangolin is indeed a mammal. Some pangolins are as small as a house cat, while others are as big as a medium-sized do…
Bird Flight - Deep Dive #2 - Smarter Every Day 61
So, what do you do to hold a bird? Hold on tight and don’t be scared. That’s right! Okay, so today, on today’s deep dive here at Smarter Every Day, we’re going to learn about bird flight. When I went to Peru and shot high-speed video, I learned a whole lo…
Inside the Elite Meeting Spots for Billion-Dollar Decisions
A new world order, the great reset, globalism, universal basic income, fake news, and media manipulation, and piles of cash to make it all happen. This is what the average conspiracy theorist imagines when they think about Davos, the Bilderberg Group, or …