HORNBILL 9/10 - White-crowned Hornbill

White-Crowned Hornbill

Got to shoot my last hornbill subspecies at Tiger Temple in  Bangkok Thailand. It was place in a  large aviary amongst several other hornbill and ground birds. 

WCH looks  monotonous unlike the other brightly coloured hornbills. It is the rarer bird to see amongst 9 species of hornbills of Malaysia. This species is found in the Thai-Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Borneo. This bird inhabits rainforests of low and medium altitudes, usually at an elevation below 900 meters. It may also be found into fruit, oil-palm and rubber plantations when food is scarce.

It  is a large hornbill, reaching a length of 83–102 centimetres (33–40 in). Females are smaller than males. The plumage is black and white. The head, neck, breast and tail are white, while the rest of the feathers is black. It has a white crown feathers erected in a crest (hence the common name). Between the eye and the bill and on the throat there is bare dark blue skin. The bill is mainly black, with a yellowish base. Similarly to most of hornbills it has a kind of blackish casque on the top if its bill. Female have black neck and underparts. These birds are territorial and feed on various fruits, lizard, antropods and larvae.

^{Photos shot from Fuji X-2}


New sighting at Nuang Perdik in November 2016. A pair was sighted for a duration of 2-4 weeks here.  This shots taken with Fuji XT-2 This is the first time I sighted them in the wild.