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

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


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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!

Laughter

Music

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.

Music

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.

Music

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.

Music

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.

Music

Music

More Articles

View All
Behavior and Belief
Hey, Mind Field! Vanessa here. Just kidding. My name is actually Michael. That part when I said that I was Vanessa… that was a lie. So you’re welcome. Humans love lies. More precisely, we love things that aren’t entirely true– because we have to. It’s oft…
Quantum Entanglement & Spooky Action at a Distance
In the 1930s, Albert Einstein was upset with quantum mechanics. He proposed the thought experiment where, according to the theory, an event at one point in the universe could instantaneously affect another event arbitrarily far away. He called this spooky…
In Your Face - Mind Field (Ep 7)
If I asked you to show me a picture of your mother, you wouldn’t show me a, uh, closeup shot of her elbow. But you could, and you’d be right. That would be a photo of her, but it wouldn’t feel right because it’s not her face. That’s how important faces ar…
13 Misconceptions About Global Warming
[Applause] Let’s talk about the science of climate change. “Don’t you mean global warming?” “How’d you get in here?” “I’m the Internet; I never left. Now, why did you change the name?” “Global warming wasn’t happening, so you have to call it climate …
Strategy in finding limits | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
Multiple videos and exercises we cover the various techniques for finding limits, but sometimes it’s helpful to think about strategies for determining which technique to use, and that’s what we’re going to cover in this video. What you see here is a flowc…
The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces - Tikhon Bernstam
Hey guys, today we have Tea Con Burn, a multi-time YC founder. So could you just start by explaining how you first found YC? Yeah, I actually found YC because I was on Reddit. I was in graduate school, which meant I had a lot of free time. And so I was, …