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Updated: June 15, 2025
On those islands which had ever formed a part of the South American continent, we should be sure to find such common birds as chatterers and toucans and hummingbirds, and some of the peculiar American quadrupeds; while on those which had been separated from Africa, hornbills, orioles, and honeysuckers would as certainly be found.
But they were not in condition to care for following the usual fashion of dining, and least of all did they desire a dinner of different courses, so long as they had one sufficiently substantial to satisfy the simple demands of hunger. The two hornbills promised, each of them, a fair piece-de-resistance, while the fat pult was plainly a titbit, to be taken either hors d'oeuvres, or as an entree.
And certainly each new generation of orioles, spreading free wings from that pendent cradle, affords a happier illustration of judicious nurture than is to be found in the uncouth little offspring of the hornbills, which Wallace describes as "so flabby and semi-transparent as to resemble a bladder of jelly, furnished with head, legs, and rudimentary wings, but with not a sign of a feather, except a few lines of points indicating where they would come."
On the back, and extending over the limbs and membrane, the fur of these animals is short, but exquisitely soft, resembling in its texture that of the Chinchilla. I returned to Palembang by water, and while staying a day at a village while a boat was being made watertight, I had the good fortune to obtain a male, female, and young bird of one of the large hornbills.
Kirk found upwards of thirty species of ferns on this and other mountains, and even good-sized tree-ferns; though scarcely a single kind is to be met with on the plains. Lemon and orange trees grew wild, and pineapples had been planted by the people. Many large hornbills, hawks, monkeys, antelopes, and rhinoceroses found a home and food among the great trees round its base.
"I've always thought of myself as like one of those poor Asiatic hornbills," she was saying. "It seems to me that all my life long some one has walled me up in a nice, safe nest and fed me through my longings and desires. I cannot get to life first hand. I'm not stupid exactly, but I am terribly limited." Helen paused, then went on more rapidly: "First it was my father.
There are several kinds of hornbills; they are peculiar birds in that the male is said to close with mud the entrance to the nest in the hollow stem of the tree, thus confining the female while she is sitting on her eggs. Only a small hole is left through which he feeds her. Its clamorous call is never to be forgotten, more startling than the laughter of the laughing jackass of Australia.
On the one side we have baboons, lions, elephants, buffaloes, and giraffes; on the other spider-monkeys, pumas, tapirs, anteaters, and sloths; while among birds, the hornbills, turacos, orioles, and honeysuckers of Africa contrast strongly with the toucans, macaws, chatterers, and hummingbirds of America.
While the body of the rooster was sputtering away in the bright blaze, Saloo entertained the party by telling them what he knew about the habits of the hornbills; and this was a good deal, for he had often caught them in the forests of Sumatra.
The strange excrescences which distinguish the heads of the hornbills, cannot possibly have arisen from any reaction against the action of surrounding forces; for even were they clearly protective, there is no reason to suppose that the heads of these birds need protection more than the heads of other birds.
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