The low-energy, solitary bird spends about 85% of its time standing, preening, and sitting on platforms of vegetation. Shoebills lay one to three eggs, and it takes about five months for a baby shoebill to mature, leave the nest and stand on its own big bird feet.ĭespite its menacing appearance, the shoebill is no avian warrior. The tall, leggy water bird prefers swamps and marshes with lots of reeds and floating vegetation, where it constructs raft-sized nests that can measure up to eight feet across-which, as an aside, is only slightly smaller than a Manhattan studio. In addition to a powerful 12-inch bill with a piercing nail-like hook on the end, the shoebill has extra-long toes for swamp-stomping and a remarkable eight-foot wingspan.įound only in the freshwater wetlands of eastern central tropical Africa, the shoebill occupies some of the most inaccessible habitats in the world. Originally grouped with storks, herons, and ibis, scientists have concluded that the shoebill is more closely related to pelicans. The consensus is that this wading bird’s bill looks like a Dutch clog. With a bill shaped like a shoe large enough to hold a human foot, shoebill became the favored moniker. Let’s dig in to find out what makes the shoebill stork stand out in a flock:ĭubbed Balaeniceps rex, “King Whalehead” or whale-headed stork by British ornithologist John Gould in 1851, the bird was known as abu markub, “father of the shoe” by the Arab people, and schuhschnabel or “shoebill” by the Germans. If you happened upon a shoebill stork in your travels, your first thought after you stopped shaking in your wading boots would most likely be, “Whoa, that is one super-sized, scarily pre-historic looking bird… dino-bird… bird-o-saur…” Standing five feet tall with a saucer-eyed, do-you-see-how-I-see-you stare and a bone-crusher of a hooked bill, this fearsome swamp dweller is not an escapee from Jurassic Park but a distinctive African wading bird considered one of the most extraordinary feathered creatures on Earth.
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