The Nature Of Borneo
Season 1 .BIRDS
Contemporary ecologist corroborate the value of the forest fig. Mark Leighton, who stidied dispersal of rainforest fruits and now directs the research station at West Kalimantan's Gunung Palung National Park, writes : ''In the rain forests of Malesia [Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea] no genus is more imfortant than the figs, the giant tress, which are mostly stranglers or banyans. In every forest studied it has been found that the figs collectively are in fruit the whole year found. Big fit tress fruit copiously and great congregations of animals assamble in their crowns at these time. Cranbrook observed large aggregations of hornbills in fruiting fig tress in Sarawak, with as many as 50 Birds of up to four of Borneo's eight species present simultaneously.
Hornbills are critical to the dispersal of the figs because they eat, the entire fruit, including the seed, and then fly long distance, dispersing the seeds widely. Fruits bats, Pigeon and Fairy Bluebird, which also relish figs, often simply nibble at the flesh, dropping the seeds below the parents plants.
Sarawak is known as the "Land Of Hornbills," but these remarkable birds are found throughthout Borneo. They have close relatives in mainland Asia and Africa but are not related to the large-billed Amazonian toucans.
Growing from the base of the upper bill is a horny excresence called a casque. It is usually hollow or filled with spongy tissue, but the Helmeted hornbill's large, square gold-and-crimson casque is solid-ideal for carving into earrings, snuff bottles, belt buckles or statuettes, Hornbill "'ivory" was for centuries shipped to China as bo-ting (Golden jade), fetching higher prices than elephant ivory or even jade itself. Tha carving was originated, however, by Bornean Dayaks. Some of the most spectacular examples can be seen in Kuching's Sarawak Museum, and elderly Kelabits in Sarawak's uplands still carve the casques into Pendants for their shoulder-length earlobes.
During matting season, the male hornbills themselves reportedly use their casqued bills for spectacular head-on collisions in mid-air, and as a tool during the hornbill's unique mating and incubation.
A month of more before matting, the male begin courtship feeeding of the female, who, when ready to lay, enters a nest hole high in a hollow tree. The pair then spend two or three days plastering up the hole with her clay-like droppings-she on the inside, he on the outside-using the sides of their bills as trowels.
