Other names for the shoebill include the boat-bill, bog-bird, lesser lechwe-eater (referring to the shoebill’s alleged taste for lechwe, or aquatic antelope), and abu markub, or “father of a slipper” in Arabic. Shoebills are also called whale-headed storks.īalaeniceps rex means “whale-head king,” evidently a reference to its bill shape resembling the head of a baleen whale (as well as a shoe). At an 1851 meeting of the British Zoological Society, naturalist John Gould presented a description of the shoebill based on Parkyns’s specimens and gave it the scientific name Balaeniceps rex. Werne’s indigenous guides told him “that they had seen an extraordinary bird, as big as a big camel, with a bill like a pelican’s, though wanting a pouch,” according to a 1908 edition of The Avicultural Magazine.Ībout 10 years later, a collector named Mansfield Parkyns brought two shoebill skins to England, giving British zoologists their first look at the weird bird. On his expedition in Africa to find the source of the White Nile in 1840, Werne camped at Lake No, part of a 12,000-square-mile wetland called the Sudd in what is now South Sudan. European naturalists were introduced to shoebills in the 1840s.Ī German diplomat and explorer named Ferdinand Werne was the first European to hear about the shoebill. In fact, this characteristic confused taxonomists: In the past, some felt that the shoebill’s habit placed it within the family of true storks, since all true storks also use their own droppings to cool off.
Shoebills practice urohydrosis, the effective-if revolting-habit of defecating on their legs to lower their body temperature. More recent studies on the shoebill's eggshell structure and DNA have supported its place among the Pelecaniformes.
“There is, in fact, not the shadow of a doubt that it is either a heron or a stork but the question is, which?” zoologist Frank Evers Beddard wrote in 1905. Others countered that herons have specialized feathers than release a powdery down to help with preening, but shoebills didn’t have these feathers, so they must be storks belonging to the family Ciconiiformes. Some taxonomists said that the shoebill's syrinx, or vocal organ, resembled those of herons belonging to the family Pelecaniformes, which also includes ibises, pelicans, and boobies. Over the past couple of centuries, naturalists have debated where shoebills should appear on the Tree of Life. Shoebills may be more closely related to pelicans than storks. Complemented by their golden eyes, the posture affects a very convincing death stare. Shoebills can stand virtually motionless for hours with their bills held down against their necks.
You really can’t mistake them for any other bird: They grow 4 to 5 feet tall, have bluish-gray plumage and an 8-plus-foot wingspan, and their bill, which takes up a majority of their face, looks like a huge Dutch wooden clog. Shoebills live in the vast wetlands of the Nile watershed in eastern Africa. Shoebill storks could win staring contests. But there are a lot of misconceptions about shoebill storks-the first being that they're not actually storks. These stately wading birds stalk the marshes of South Sudan, Uganda, and elsewhere in tropical East Africa, snatching up prey with their unique, immediately recognizable bills. Shoebill storks have been called the world’s most terrifying bird (though the cassowary might disagree).
0 kommentar(er)
