Inside the Mission to Save the Rare Helmeted Hornbill From Poachers | National Geographic

This is about the second week of this expedition. We are at our third location here. My mission is to photograph the helmeted armbands. These hella nerd hornbills have been occupying these forests for thousands of years, but recently they've fallen prey to basically human greed.

This hornbill has this really unique horn on its head that's a solid character material. Local people have been hunting this bird for a long time, and it has somehow survived. So, it has learned to avoid humans. But recently, there's been a surge in demand for the carb hornbill products in China, and this has led to a kind of industrial-scale poaching with hunters and guns.

I’m trying to document this bird, just sort of show people what it's like to try to get some more attention for it before it's too late.

“Well, it's not them. Chuck's Houdini, isn't it?”

Yes!

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The female and the male both came to the house cavity. She had this really amazing call. The female was working on the entrance, and there was a moment when he only pulled her head out and looked like they almost touched beaks.

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I’m speechless. This here is kind of amazing because you can see, you can still see the feathers.

We have here about how many?

I think we have a lot of... a hundred? A hundred? Two hundred?

Yeah, these are, you know, just the ones that were captured by the authorities. There are probably thousands estimated that have been exported from Indonesia just in the past few years. My estimation is about six thousand helmeted hornbills have been killed in West Kalimantan alone in 2013 alone.

In 2015, it's leaped from near threatened into critical and endangered, which is one step before extinction.

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This pair has likely made it for life. Every year, they look for a hollow cavity, and if they find one, they'll clear it out. The female will seal herself in, sometimes 30 meters high in the canopy.

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The male provides all the food for her and their newborn chick until the young bird is able to fledge 150 days later. Large marvels like this are believed to live for 40 or maybe even up to 50 years in the wild.

So, killing a male for its horn is removing an individual from the environment that may have funny or 30 years of reproductive life left. Sometimes, depending on when the male is hunted, if he's killed at a critical time when the female is inside the nest with a chick, and maybe she's molting, she can't fly and escape. Killing the male might result in the female and the baby also losing their life.

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