Critically Endangered
Helmeted Hornbill
Rhinoplax vigil
The helmeted hornbill is a very large bird in the hornbill family.
Appearance
It has mostly blackish plumage, except that the belly and legs are white and the tail is white with a black band near the tip of each feather. The tail is long and the two central tail feathers are much longer than the others, giving the bird a total length greater than that of any other hornbill species. The body length is 110–120 cm (43–47 in), not counting the tail feathers, that boost the length a further 50 cm (20 in).
One male weighed 3.1 kg (6.8 lb) in weight while two females averaged about 2.7 kg (6.0 lb). Although sometimes considered the largest Asian hornbill, their body weight appears to be similar to that of the great hornbill (and considerably less than the African ground hornbills).
Range and habitat
It is found on the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo, Thailand and Myanmar. It is a belief among the Punan Bah that a large helmeted hornbill guards the river between life and death.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Helmeted Hornbill is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Helmeted hornbill, Wikidata item Q226043. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
