A long Awaited Moment | Hornbill | 10% to SL-Charity

Saturday was cold and dark due to the continuous rain. It was around 4.45 p.m. We were having tea by sitting in Varanda. Suddenly I saw the movement of a giant bird on the Rambutan tree. I had a clue about who is this because I saw him multiple times at our garden a few days ago.

Within a few seconds, I attached the lens to my mobile phone and came out without making any rush. Now I have used to set up the mobile phone with an external camera within 30 seconds.

Even though my mobile camera (Samsung Galaxy M21) gives very clean shots under daylight, it performs very poorly under dark as same as the majority of other mobile phone cameras. Because of that, today's shots are not clean as the photos I took during day time.

I notice a bird that is a bit larger than 1 feet sitting on a branch. The beak was black, and he is not the one in the first picture. he/she was hiding among leaves and suddenly I noticed a movement as fast as a light of the flash. Same time I heard the sound of wing clapping.

_{A second bird came to the same position}

A second bird with an orange beak was sitting in the same place instead of a black beak bird.

I was surprised on what just happened. Now there were two birds, of same kind, one with an orange beak and the second with a black beak.

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Let's Get to Know this Bird

_{orientalbirdimages}

According to resources, this bird is Sri Lanka Grey Hornbill (ශ්‍රී ලංකා අළු කෑදැත්තා). I was aware of the bird called "කෑදැත්තා - Hornbill" but never knew this one is it. This one is an endemic (ආවේණික) bird to Sri Lanka.

The beak of the female one is black and the male one is cream-colored (what I called as orange). The size is given as 55 to 59 cm which is pretty large compared to a crow. For more details, you can read Wikipedia

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Back to the story, the female one (black beaked one) flew away first. The male one spent more time on nearby trees. It seems he doesn't like to expose out. On another hand, other birds were trying to attack him.

He moved to multiple trees. Another specialty is, he flies from 2-3m high to the ground. Once he flew so close to me and I was really afraid.

The bird was a little fidgety sometimes. He moves to multiple branches of the same tree.

I wish I could take clear photos than this. Perhaps I can do it on another day. I am very happy about taking photos of කෑදැත්තා because I was waiting for a long time for this.