Feb 26, 2020
Species for Sale: Helmeted Hornbill
by Thomas Gomersall
The helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil) is a large rainforest bird found in Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand. Like many Asian hornbills, it has a large, colourful casque on its head. But unlike other hornbills, whose casques are hollow, the casque of the helmeted hornbill is solid and is used by the males in aerial head-butting contests over mates and territory (Kinnaird et al, 2003). Pairs mate for life and during the breeding season, the female will lay usually one egg in a tree cavity, molt all of her feathers (rendering her flightless) and seal up the entrance with clay, faeces and regurgitated fruit until it is too narrow for her to leave. Until the chick is ready to fledge, they are both completely reliant on the male to bring them food (Dingle & Hatten, 2020; Chong, 2011).
Due to its attractive golden-red colour, as well as being made of relatively soft keratin, the casque of the helmeted hornbill is sometimes used for ornaments and jewellery (Collar, 2015). From about AD 700 onwards, casques were sent to China and later Japan for this purpose, often as gifts for royalty. By the 1950s, the trade appeared to have died out, after a steady decades-long decline in demand, and was made illegal in the 1970s. But now, hornbill casque products are back in fashion as a status symbol for an increasingly affluent middle class in China (Lazarus, 2018), where the black market price for them can be five times higher than that of ivory (Collar, 2015).
Aside from the occasional auction, there does not appear to be much of a market for hornbill casque products in Hong Kong itself. However, the city does seem to be a key transit point for smugglers. According to the Environmental Investigation Agency, of the 2,722 casques and casque products seized between 2010 and 2017, 237 were in Hong Kong, with an additional 14 seized in China from a Hong Kong resident. More worryingly, these seizures likely represent only a tiny percentage of all the casques smuggled (Dingle & Hatten, 2020; Lazarus, 2018; Environmental Investigation Agency, 2017).
Critically Endangered
The re-emergent hornbill casque trade has had a devastating effect on the helmeted hornbill. In 2013 alone, 6,000 were killed for their casques just in the Indonesian region of West Kalimantan. Combined with deforestation, in just three years this has caused the bird’s IUCN Red List status to plummet from ‘near threatened’ in 2012 to ‘critically endangered’ in 2015 and today, it survives only in a few small pockets throughout its range (Gokkon, 2017).
This decline is compounded by the hornbill’s reproductive biology, as each female tends to lay only one egg per year and the chick takes at least five to six months just to fledge the nest, meaning that populations cannot quickly replenish themselves (Lazarus, 2018). Also, because the female is so dependent on the male to bring food during nesting, if he is killed, both she and the chick will probably starve to death, particularly if she still can’t fly by then. Even if she does survive, she may not mate again for many years, further slowing population recovery (Collar, 2015). Captive breeding efforts are unlikely to be successful, as the helmeted hornbill has extremely specific nesting requirements that cannot be easily met in captivity (Evans, 2016). At current rates of killing, the IUCN estimates that it could be extinct within three generations (Lazarus, 2018).
The trade also threatens other hornbill species with casques (particularly rhinoceros hornbills), as hunters with poor identification skills accidentally shoot them after mistaking them for helmeted hornbills (Lazarus, 2018). As all of these hornbills are key seed dispersers for fruiting trees, their decline could lead to the loss of important foods
Hong Kong connection
A major obstacle to helmeted hornbill conservation is a scarcity of information on poaching hotspots and the exact routes that smugglers take when transporting casques. As members of a wider collaborative group under the IUCN Helmeted Hornbill Working Group, researchers at the Conservation Forensics Lab at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) are working to change this.
By extracting mitochondrial DNA from casques seized in Hong Kong and comparing it to that of hornbills from known locations in the wild, lab director Dr. Caroline Dingle and PhD student Chloe Hatten aim to determine the geographic origins of these poached hornbills. This can then be coupled with information on what country arrested smugglers came to Hong Kong from, what airline they used and where they were going. Taken together, this builds a map of smuggling routes and helps to determine which regions are experiencing the heaviest poaching. Hong Kong customs officers could then start screening flights from those regions and airlines frequently used by smugglers more closely for hornbill casques (Dingle & Hatten, 2020).
Long-term use of these genetic techniques could also help authorities to adjust their efforts in response to changes in poaching activity. For example, if future analyses detect a change in the origin of seized casques (e.g. a switch from Indonesian hornbills to Thai ones), that information could be used to increase anti-poaching efforts in that region and increase screening of flights from there by customs officers (Dingle & Hatten, 2020).
Additionally, the lab is collaborating with Amanda Whitfort of HKU’s Faculty of Law on the creation of ‘victim impact statements’ — documents about species that are traded through Hong Kong. These statements provide information about the impacts of the illegal trade on endangered species and can be used by prosecutors in court cases, potentially leading to higher penalties and stronger prosecution for the trafficking of helmeted hornbills and other species (Dingle & Hatten, 2020).
References:
· Chong, M.H.N. 2011. Observations on the breeding biology of helmeted hornbill in Pahang, Peninsular Malaysia. The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, vol. 24: 163pp.-165pp.
· Collar, N.J. 2015. Helmeted Hornbills Rhinoplax vigil and the ivory trade: the crisis that came out of nowhere. BirdingASIA, vol. 24: 12pp.–17pp.
· Dingle, C. (PhD) and Hatten, C., interviewed by Thomas Gomersall, 2020, The University of Hong Kong.
· Environmental Investigation Agency, Illegal trade seizures: Helmeted hornbills, [website], 2017, https://eia-international.org/wildlife/wildlife-trade-maps/illegal-trade-seizures-helmeted-hornbills/ (Accessed: 6 December 2020).
· Evans, R., ‘Asia races to save the Critically Endangered helmeted hornbill’. Mongabay, 7 November 2016, https://news.mongabay.com/2016/11/asia-races-to-save-the-critically-endangered-helmeted-hornbill/ (Accessed: 31 January 2020).
· Gokkon, B., ‘Helmeted hornbill, on verge of extinction, finds respite in new zone outside of known range’. Mongabay, 23 October 2017, https://news.mongabay.com/2017/10/helmeted-hornbill-extinct-conservation-area-borneo/ (Accessed: 31 January 2020).
· Kinnaird, M.F., Hadiprakarsa, Y.Y. and P. Thiensongrusamee. 2003. Aerial jousting by Helmeted Hornbills Rhinoplax vigil: observations from Indonesia and Thailand. Ibis, vol. 145(3): 506pp.–508pp.
· Lazarus, S., ‘Why Chinese demand for ‘red ivory’ dooms helmeted hornbill bird to extinction unless poaching can be stopped’. South China Morning Post, 13 January 2018, https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2127802/why-chinese-demand-red-ivory-dooms-helmeted (Accessed: 4 December 2019).
