The shoebill is a whale-headed stalker of African marshes
The shoebill Balaeniceps rex—also whale-headed or shoe-billed stork—is a large, long-legged African wader named for its enormous shoe-shaped bill and solemn look. Ancient Egyptians may have known it; Europeans classified it only in the nineteenth century after skins and live birds arrived.
Long filed with the storks, and kept there in the Sibley–Ahlquist scheme that lumped many unrelated birds into Ciconiiformes, it now sits in Pelecaniformes beside pelicans and herons, with the hamerkop as its closest relative. Patricia Cottam argued for that link from its bones in 1957, and Konstantin Mikhailov found in 1995 that its eggshells resemble those of other pelecaniforms. John Gould first described it in 1850 from a skin collected on the upper White Nile. Fossil kin include Goliathia from Early Oligocene Egypt and Paludiavis from Late Miocene Pakistan and Tunisia.
It stands 110 to 140 centimetres tall, occasionally 152, with a wingspan of 230 to 260 centimetres and a weight of 4 to 7 kilograms, males a little heavier. Adults are blue-grey; chicks hatch with a modest silvery bill that balloons within weeks. Usually silent, shoebills clatter their bills at the nest, sometimes adding a cattle-like moo, and begging chicks sound uncannily like hiccups. In flight the neck is pulled in, and at roughly 150 flaps a minute its wingbeat is among the slowest of any bird.
It lives in dense freshwater marshes of central tropical Africa, from South Sudan, where the Sudd is a stronghold, to northern Zambia, favouring mixed papyrus and reed beds. Rock art at Oued Djerat in Algeria shows it lived far to the north when the Sahara was wet in the Early Holocene. Famous for standing motionless like a statue, it often perches on floating vegetation, forages at least 20 metres from its nearest neighbour, and pairs defend nesting territories of 2 to 4 square kilometres.
Source: Shoebill
