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Identify: Shoebill (Balaeniceps rex)
The place it lives: Marshes and swamps in East Africa
What it eats: Fish and reptiles
Why it is superior: This menacing and prehistoric-looking hen can develop as much as 5 toes (1.5 meters) tall – and is provided with a sharp-edged, 1-foot-long (0.3 meter) invoice — the third-largest hen beak on the planet.
Its big invoice and lengthy, skinny legs make it a formidable ambush predator —standing fully nonetheless earlier than lunging ahead to seize unsuspecting prey and swallow it complete.
A 2015 study revealed within the Journal of African Ornithology discovered that catfish have been its commonest prey, making up round 71% of its meals. Nevertheless, the shoebill can also be recognized to feast on eels, snakes and even child crocodiles.
Shoebills are largely solitary, however breeding pairs are monogamous and lay up to three eggs in a clutch — although, as a consequence of rivalry between siblings, normally just one survives to maturity. That is sometimes the bigger first-born, which both out-competes any siblings for meals, or kills them.
Associated: The bird that came back from the dead by evolving twice
The second or third chicks are basically spares that function a backup if the primary would not survive.
This habits was captured in a clip from the BBC David Attenborough collection “Africa,” exhibiting the older chick biting at its youthful sibling. When the mom returns to the nest, it affords no care to the smaller offspring.
Though generally incorrectly known as a stork, the shoebill is definitely the one member of the Balaeniceps genus and the broader household Balaenicipitidae, with its closest living relatives being pelicans. Its ancestors from the Pelecaniformes order emerged on the finish of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years in the past).
The large-billed hen is listed as vulnerable on the Worldwide Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Purple Record, with simply 5,000 to 8,000 birds left.
