About the Great Hornbill
The great hornbill is one of India's most magnificent birds — a huge, striking black-and-white bird with a spectacular yellow casque (horn) on top of its bill that gives the family its name. Its loud, barking call reverberating through the rainforest canopy is one of the defining sounds of the Western Ghats and northeast India's forests. The state bird of Kerala and Arunachal Pradesh, the great hornbill is considered sacred by many tribal communities.
Great hornbills have an extraordinary nesting behaviour — the female seals herself inside a tree hollow using mud and droppings, leaving only a narrow slit through which the male passes food for up to four months while she incubates eggs and raises chicks. This 'sealed nest' evolved as protection against tree-climbing predators. Great hornbills are important seed dispersers for large-fruited rainforest trees — they can carry many fruits simultaneously in their enormous bill and disperse seeds over vast distances.