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

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.