The Ground Hornbill (Southern Hornbill) is a common bird in South Africa, and it is large and aggressive. Ground hornbills hunt insects and small reptiles, and sometimes larger lizards. Hornbills can challenge vultures when they move, competing with them for control of carrion. Ground hornbills like to nest in large trees, and now there is a lack of large trees nesting in South Africa, and the survival status of ground hornbills has been greatly affected, and the ground hornbills in many parts of South Africa have become "endangered".
The "endangered" appearance of South African hornbills is also related to their breeding patterns, with ground hornbills being cooperative breeders, with each pair of breeding birds always having at least two other birds to assist. Experiments with captivity have found that birds without six years of experience as helpers will not be able to breed successfully if they become breeders.
Meanwhile, researchers speculate that the number of hornbills has decreased, and there are other hidden reasons, but they have not yet been confirmed.
For the past 20 years, a team of researchers has been studying and protecting hornbills in a private nature reserve in an effort to increase, help slow and reverse their decline. Habitat loss has led to a shortage of nesting sites in the area. So one of the team's earliest missions was to build artificial nests throughout the reserve to provide a breeding opportunity for these large birds, and it was a huge success in this regard.
These artificial nests can help the ground hornbills change the survival status quo, shield the ground hornbills from the wind and rain and hide from some predators. In order to observe the survival of the ground hornbill in real time, they installed cameras near the nest of the ground hornbill to monitor which birds were breeding and what was happening in the nest without attracting attention.
The footage captured confirms long-held speculation that there are other factors that affect the population of hornbills.
Recently, a camera captured the criminal who entered the nest to attack the hornbill: the leopard. A leopard appeared in the artificial nest of the ground hornbill, and the leopard looked at the nest twice, and then climbed into the tree hole. When the leopard raids the hornbill nest, the adult hornbill is on guard next to it, and in order to protect its nest, the adult hornbill deliberately runs to attract the attention of the leopard, but all this does not help.
After burrowing into the nest, the leopard quickly retreated from the nest, and the process was filmed by the camera. Leopards raid the dens of hornbills, proving that it is one of the invisible natural enemies of the hornbill and responsible for the decline in the number of hornbills.
Of course, the hornbills are endangered, and the biggest problem is the excessive destruction of the environment by humans. If humans can reduce the damage to the natural environment, even if the leopard population is large, it will not lead to the extinction of the ground hornbill. After all, in nature, species are balanced, and there is rarely a unilateral imbalance.