The Papuan Hornbill is one of roughly sixty species of hornbills living across the savannahs and forests of Africa and Southeast Asia. The most striking characteristic of hornbills in general tend to be their long downward curved bills with unique casques. The casque, which you might notice, is a hollow structure that sits on the upper part of the bill. For the Papuan Hornbill, their casque has a lower profile with a symmetrical pattern of embedded channels, but can take a variety of interesting shapes, colours, and textures across hornbill species.
While hornbills are fascinating for many reasons, collections of specimens, artefacts, biological accounts, and ethnographies seem to reveal a fixation with the material bodies of these birds and the values they hold for people. Of course, these stories are important, but what is often lost in them is the significance of the social and, perhaps, cultural ways of life of the birds themselves. This is something that researchers of animal behaviour have begun to think about, as they encounter more and more of the complexity and diversity of the social lives of the species they study, behaviours like foraging, nest making, tool use, and vocalisation.
Hornbills are known to be incredibly social and have a range of interesting behaviours, one of which is their vocalisations, made up of various rhythmic calls. These calls are not only unique amongst each species of hornbill, but also each individual bird. It turns out that the hollow casque of many hornbills creates a resonating chamber, like the body of a musical instrument, that interacts with the vibrations of sound emanating from the vocal cord or syrinx, shaping the unique quality of each hornbill’s call.
[Papuan Hornbill vocalization]
More than an ornamental detail, we might think of the hornbill’s casque as part of the character of its own voice and presence as an individual within a community. Perhaps, then, in the stories we tell about a bird like the Papuan hornbill, the casque may not only be interesting, biologically, but also socially, in the shaping of hornbill voice, identity, and community.
Object details:
Papuan Hornbill (Buceros ruficollis)
Chevert expedition at Hall Sound, Central Province, New Guinea, 25 August 1875
NHB.2935 / ETA.473.1
Recording of Papuan Hornbill vocalisation courtesy of Jan-Uwe Schmidt, via xeno-canto (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED). https://xeno-canto.org/827546
Linked Side Trails
Location
Level One
