64 PICARIAN BIRDS. 



If well fed, however, they soon gain strength and assume their plumage ; and then 

 they flap about the house and steal or beg for food. At one place where I stayed 

 collecting for some time, a native, in whose house I had established myself, 

 had reared a very fine specimen of this bird. It was the mast voracious brute 

 I ever saw. It was omnivorous, and nothing came amiss to it or seemed to 

 disagree with it. It was a fine full-gix)wn male, and a jolly fellow into the bargain. 

 Very often he would descend fix)m a tall camphor- wood tree, which stood 

 a hundred yards or so from the house, in the jungle, to the top of which he was 

 fond of going to sun his wings and clean himself after a meal. When he was 

 very hungry, it was only by tying a string to his leg, and moving him to the 

 jside of the house, that he could be prevented from eating off the same plate as 

 myself, or putting his great homed head into the rice-dish or curry-bowl. Bones 

 of a fowl, curried or not, were gobbled up instantly ; and the wonder was to me 

 how he managed to bolt big bones and tough biscuits without choking himself. 

 Whatever was thrown anywhere near his head was sure to fall into his open bill ; 

 indeed, I never saw a dog that could catch food in his mouth better ; everything 

 was caught on the point of his great bill, and then tossed into the air, being again 

 caught and swallowed; this tossing was always performed. Bones, the entire 

 bodies of small birds from which the skins had been removed for preserving, lumps 

 of bread, biscuits, finiit, fisli, or wet rice, shavings, and even nodules of moist eai*th, 

 all seemed equally welcome; and after taking in a cargo of provisions which 

 would have formed an ample meal for a pig twenty times his own weight, he 

 would ' saw the air' with his great wings, and having gained his favourite perch 

 on the tall camphor-tree, would sun himself and plume his wings, and shriek until 

 he became hungry rather than hoai"se." 



Great Pied This species {Dichoceros hicornis) is the largest of the hornbills, 



Hombiu. measuring nearly 5 feet in length, with a great casque, concave on 

 the top, and nearly square, rising into well-marked comers on the fore-part. The 

 colour is black with white bases and tips to the greater wing-coverts and quills ; 

 the tail being white with a broad band of black just before the tips of the feathers ; 

 while the bill and the casque are yellow, inclining to orange-red on the top of the 

 latter, with some black marks at the base of the bill and along the margins of the 

 casque ; and the naked skin round the eye is fleshy pink, and the iris blood-red. 

 This hornbill, remarkable for its clumsy-looking bill, inhabits the hills of Southern 

 India, the Himalaya, and their continuation in the Burmese countries to Siam, 

 ranging southward through Tenasserim and the Malay Peninsula to Sumatra. 

 It is the only representative of its genus ; and, as in the other species of giant 

 hornbills, there is a difference in the sexes, displaying itself not in plumage, but in 

 the colour of the bill. Thus in the female there is no black on the casque ; while 

 the bare skin of the face is reddish, and the eye is white, instead of red. Mr. Hume 

 has published notes on the nesting of the present species, and it is interesting to 

 note that many observers in India must have discovered the fact of the strange 

 nesting-habits of the hornbills previous to Livingstone, who is generally credited 

 with having been the first to draw attention to the incarceration of the female 

 bird during the period of incubation. Colonel Tickell, for instance, writing in 1855 

 of the nesting of the great pied hornbill in Tenasserim, says : — " On my way back 



