Endangered
Visayan Hornbill
Penelopides panini
The Visayan hornbill is a hornbill found in tropical moist lowland forests of the Philippines in the Western Visayas region that includes the islands of Panay, Negros and formerly as well as the island of Masbate, and formerly Ticao, in the Philippines.
Appearance
The male has a creamy-white head and neck, a white upper chest, a reddish-brown lower chest and uppertail-coverts, and a creamy-white buff tail with a broad black tip. The bill and casque are blackish. The former with yellowish ridges. The bare ocular skin is pinkish-white.
Published measurements include mass about 509.
Range and habitat
The Visayan hornbill is a hornbill found in tropical moist lowland forests of the Philippines in the Western Visayas region that includes the islands of Panay, Negros and formerly as well as the island of Masbate, and formerly Ticao, in the Philippines. As is the case with all five Philippine tarictic hornbills, formerly considered to be just one species, it is declining due to habitat destruction, hunting and the illegal wildlife trade.
Negros Island is one of the most deforested areas in the country due to its sugar industry and logging with most of its forests being totally lost before the 21st century. Even so, there is conflicting data as the Philippine Biodiversity Conservation Foundation has counted 3,584 hornbill just on the island of Negros.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
All hornbills are monogamous and mate for life.They are cavity nesters and rely on large dipterocarp trees for breeding. The female seals itself within the tree cavity and the male is in charge of gathering food for its mate and chicks.
The male stores food in a gular pouch and regurgitates it to feed its mate and chicks. Cooperative breeding, wherein immature birds from previous seasons help out in feeding the female and chick has not been observed with this species so far.
In crisis
It is illegal to hunt, capture or possess these birds under Philippine Law RA 9147. This is a highly endangered species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature assessment from the year 2000 estimates that there are 1,200 individuals remaining in the wild.
This species' main threat is habitat loss with wholesale clearance of forest habitats as a result of logging, agricultural conversion and mining activities occurring within the range. The last time the Ticao tarictic was seen was in 1971, and it is now likely to be extinct.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Visayan Hornbill is 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 Visayan Hornbill, Wikidata item Q647138. 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.
