Fighting in Asia’s National Parks to Save the Helmeted Hornbill

Poached for its horn, the Helmeted Hornbill is struggling for its survival in the wild, and poaching syndicates have flooded the bird’s range with thousands of rifles to hunt them for their ‘red ivory’ casques or beaks. Now, the iconic bird is now on the verge of extinction.

Global Conservation’s investments in park and wildlife protection in four (4) UNESCO World Heritage and national parks in Asia is giving hope to save the last sanctuaries for the critically endangered Helmeted Hornbill.

Global Conservation funding of WCS Wildlife Crime Units in Sumatra over the past three years has also put pressure on poachers and syndicates with some big arrests in 2018. Overall, the situation remains dire.

To protect critical Helmeted Hornbill habitats, Global Conservation is deploying Global Park Defense at four national parks in Asia:

Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park, Myanmar

DaMaI World Heritage, Sabah Borneo, Malaysia

Leuser Ecosystem, Sumatra Indonesia

Thap Lan World Heritage, Thailand

As recent as 2012, the Helmeted Hornbill was listed as Near Threatened, but in 2015 it was uplisted on the IUCN Red List to Critically Endangered. They are threatened by hunting pressure fueled by the value placed on their red casque, called 'hornbill ivory' or 'red ivory', in the illegal wildlife trade.

In 2018, WCS’s Wildlife Crime Unit arrested a helmeted hornbill poacher along with the rangers in Gunung Leuser National Park. The suspect was arrested with the evidence of 1 rifle with silencer and monocular, headlamp, bullets, and logistics.

The helmeted hornbill is a spectacular, large, Critically Endangered bird that only occurs in intact tropical forests in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Thailand and Myanmar.

Helmeted hornbills pair for life, and each pair maintains a large territory, marked and defended by one of the most dramatic calls of any bird, culminating in what sounds like a cackling laugh audible from at least a kilometer away through the forest. Widespread clearance of much of the species’ lowland forest habitat, especially for monoculture oil palm plantations, is a major threat to the species.

According to Wildlife Conservation Society, “a dramatic rise in organized hunting has been critical to their demise".

The helmeted hornbill has long been under threat due to hunting for its wing and long central tail feathers used in traditional costumes, which has knocked down numbers, and caused the species to disappear entirely from parts of its range. Furthermore, the species is the only hornbill with a solid casque, also known as red ivory which is carved into artefacts, the demand for which drives the poaching pressure on the species.”

The birds have been important to the Dayaks for at least 2,000 years. Their long tail feathers are still used in headdresses, and their casques were carved into ear pendants and other adornments.

By the year 700, trade between Borneo and China was flourishing, and in 1371 helmeted hornbill “ivory” was first recorded as reaching China as a tribute gift from the sultan of Brunei. The Chinese, already skilled in the art of carving elephant ivory, transformed helmeted hornbill casques into belt buckles, buttons, bracelets, snuff boxes, and more. Sometimes intricate scenes were carved into a casque that was still attached to the bird’s skull. By the mid-1800s demand had shifted west, and the Chinese imported casques mainly to carve and sell to Europeans.

Global Conservation is deploying Global Park Defense to protect key Helmeted Hornbill population strongholds through effective anti-poaching efforts and on-ground protection.

The helmeted hornbill’s casque—the horny helmet above its beak— is mostly solid, unlike those of other hornbills. Softer than ivory, it can be finely carved into beads, figurines, and artistic scenes. These casques, carved with Chinese designs, were confiscated by law enforcement in the U.S. Chinese-run criminal syndicates that smuggle tiger parts and pangolins recently diversified into helmeted hornbill casques.

According to National Geographic, "the helmeted hornbill, one of 57 hornbill species in Africa and Asia, is found only in the lowland forests of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and southern Thailand. Helmeted hornbills stand apart from the other hornbills because their casques are mostly solid with a thick layer of keratin, the same material as fingernails, hair, and rhino horn. Not much is understood about helmeted hornbill behavior, but they’re known to use their casques to joust while in flight, perhaps in competition for nesting sites or fruit trees.

The birds are omnivorous but favor the fruit of strangler figs, which start as a seed in the canopy of a host tree and send roots downward, slowly encasing and killing the tree. Strangler figs, when fruiting, serve as the rain forest’s grocery store for the menagerie that feasts on the ripe fruit—from tree shrews, giant squirrels, gibbons, and orangutans to nearly a thousand species of birds.

Hornbills are vital to the survival of Southeast Asia’s forests. As “farmers of the forest,” they disperse seeds by regurgitating or defecating them, helping to replenish trees over several square miles. It’s an especially important task now, given how much primary forest has been cleared by commercial enterprises. Widespread logging also is reducing habitat for Asian hornbill species and threatening their ability to nest.

Helmeted hornbills are especially picky, requiring huge trees with a hollow cavity to nest in. Those happen to be the oldest and biggest in the forest—and are therefore highly valued by loggers. The birds are slow to reproduce, breeding once a year and raising only one chick. Because the mother and the chick live sealed inside the nest cavity for some five months until the youngster is ready to fledge, they depend on the male to feed them. If the male is killed—shot by poachers for his casque, for example—the rest of the family will likely die.

Softer than ivory and easily carved, hornbill casques are in high demand in Asia, to be fashioned into beads, pendants, and intricate works of art. For a subset of China’s wealthy class, rare wildlife products such as helmeted hornbill carvings, elephant ivory, and rhinoceros horn can be a sign of money, power, and luxury."

Quoted paragraphs above from National Geographic –  Poached for Its Horn, This Rare Bird Struggles to Survive: The mysterious helmeted hornbill fades from Southeast Asia’s forests as poachers and traffickers target it for the illegal wildlife trade.

Indonesian law enforcement first became aware of large-scale helmeted hornbill trafficking in 2012, when natural resources officers at an airport in West Kalimantan, a province on the island of Borneo, stopped two Chinese women from smuggling 96 casque pieces out of the country. Soon more confiscations followed, with some seizures of casques numbering in the hundreds.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a U.K.-based nonprofit that has been tracking seizures along with the wildlife-trade monitoring organization Traffic, says these seizures likely represent a fraction of the helmeted hornbill casques being traded.

Some helmeted hornbill poachers are opportunistic hunters who will shoot any animal they can eat or sell, says Dwi Adhiasto, who oversees the wildlife crime units of the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Indonesia Program. Others, he says, are supplied by organized criminal networks that provide them with guns and gear for expeditions into the forest specifically to hunt helmeted hornbills.

These networks, he explains, mainly target species with a more established illegal trade—such as tigers and the world’s only truly scaly mammal, the pangolin—but they realized they can raise the bottom line by diversifying into helmeted hornbills.

“Tiger fangs, pangolins, and also helmeted hornbill beaks—it’s those three that exist in the criminal networks in Asia operated by Chinese,” Dwi says. The groups typically are headed by a Chinese kingpin who controls sophisticated transnational trade and money laundering schemes, he says. The networks take advantage of the reluctance of law enforcement and the judicial system to treat wildlife crime as seriously as other types of organized crime, such as drugs and human trafficking.

In June 2015 Indonesian authorities arrested two men suspected of smuggling casques in northern Sumatra, an entry point for poachers accessing Gunung Leuser National Park. They were believed to be operating with a team of 30 poachers who hunted inside the park using rifles modified with silencers, according to WCS, which assisted in gathering information. The men confessed to selling at least 124 casques over six months to a Chinese middleman, whom they would contact using a disposable cell phone to avoid detection. During the arrest, authorities confiscated 12 casques, two rifles, a digital scale, and two cell phones.

Picture of three confiscated carved with Chinese design helmeted hornbill’s casques.

Photos courtesy of Birdlife International, National Geographic and WCS Indonesia.

Helmeted hornbill products sell for three to five times the price of elephant ivory. A helmeted hornbill head was recently on sale for US$3,700 in Vientiane, Laos.Their value has triggered a boom in poaching, sending the bird plunging towards extinction.

The “helmet”, for which the bird is hunted, is a solid lump, called the casque, fused along the top of its dark yellow bill and up onto the skull. The casque gets its golden red hue from protective tinted oils secreted by preen glands. Many species of hornbill have casques but most are hollow – the helmeted hornbill’s is unique because it is solid.

“There is little understanding by lawyers and the judiciary of the monetary value of these endangered species on the black market, and the ecological impact of their removal from the wild,” says Amanda Whitfort, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of law and an expert on wildlife crime.

She says that although the perpetrators are international criminal gangs, and shipments are often smuggled along the same routes used for drugs and other contraband, the importance of wildlife crime is not yet recognised by the government.