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 most 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-grown male, and a jolly fellow into the bargain. 
Very often he would descend from 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 
•side of the house, that he could be prevented from eating oft' the same plate as 
myself, or putting his great horned 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, fruit, fish, or wet rice, shavings, and even nodules of moist earth, 
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 hoarse.” 
Great Pied This species (Dichoceros bicornis ) is the largest of the hornbills, 
Hornbiii. measuring nearly 5 feet in length, with a great casque, concave on 
the top, and nearly square, rising into well-marked corners 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-reel. 
This hornbiii, 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 hornbiii in Tenasserim, says:—“ On my way back 
