Appearance
This is a large and robust bird. It has a stork-like body shape and stands over 4 feet tall, with some individuals possibly pushing 5 feet, or 1.52 meters. There are taller bird species in the world, but still, the Shoebill is pretty impressive. It’s plumage is a mostly uniform, bluish gray color, with slightly darker flight feathers.
The Shoebill’s wingspan is up to 8 feet, which is about 2.4 meters. The wings are broad and well-suited for soaring. The first time I saw a wild Shoebill, that’s what it was doing. It was soaring on thermals high over the swamp, gliding like a vulture without flapping its wings much.
In fact, the Shoebill has one of the slowest flapping rates of any bird: only about 150 beats per minute. That might sound like a lot until you realize a hummingbird can flap its tiny wings over 4,500 times a minute!
Shoebills tend to be sedentary. They stick around in the same general area year-round. So even though they’re good at soaring, they don’t normally fly long distances. Their flights are usually pretty short—really just little hops from here to there around the swamp.
The Shoebill’s wingspan is up to 8 feet, which is about 2.4 meters. The wings are broad and well-suited for soaring. The first time I saw a wild Shoebill, that’s what it was doing. It was soaring on thermals high over the swamp, gliding like a vulture without flapping its wings much.
In fact, the Shoebill has one of the slowest flapping rates of any bird: only about 150 beats per minute. That might sound like a lot until you realize a hummingbird can flap its tiny wings over 4,500 times a minute!
Shoebills tend to be sedentary. They stick around in the same general area year-round. So even though they’re good at soaring, they don’t normally fly long distances. Their flights are usually pretty short—really just little hops from here to there around the swamp.
Shoebills hang out on their own, mostly. They’re loners. Solitary creatures that stand still for long periods of time or move around sluggishly in the waterways of their swampy kingdoms.
Now what about that massive, bulging bill? Indeed, it does have a shoe-like shape. Some say it looks like a wooden Dutch clog. It’s between 9 and 12 inches long, making it the 3rd longest beak among modern-day birds.
The Shoebill’s bill is, however, as far as I know, the thickest in the world. It’s number one in that category. No other bird species has a bill with a greater circumference.
The tip of the upper bill has a hard, hook-like tip. This is a structure we call the ‘nail.’ This helps the Shoebill snag its prey. Color wise, the Shoebill’s bill is a sort of fleshy or pinkish color, with lots of random grey mottling on its surface. That enormous bill protrudes from the bird’s large head. There’s a messy little tuft of feathers that sticks out at the back end of the Shoebill’s head.
A pair of large, yellow eyes give the Shoebill a raptorial, piercing gaze. Supraorbital ridges jutting out over the eyes add to the menacing appearance. They give the Shoebill a sort of ‘furrowed brow’ look. But this is just projecting our human facial expressions onto an animal, isn’t it? The Shoebill can’t move the muscles of its face around the way we can. It’s just sort of stuck with that one expression.
So giant bill, yellow eyes, little tuft of feathers sticking out the back, permanent scowl… all on a fat head. At the opposite end of the bird are its very large feet with their extra long toes. These probably help the Shoebill walk around more easily on mats of floating vegetation or on mud.
As for sounds… Well, this species doesn’t make too many. It’s mostly silent. However, during nesting season, these birds will make a clattering sound with their bills. It sounds sort of like a distant machine gun or a motorcycle engine. Apparently, it makes some low, guttural vocal sounds too.
Family, Habitat
Family
Balaeniceps rex is the only species in the avian family Balaenicipitidae. So this family is monotypic. It contains only one genus, and that genus contains only one species: the Shoebill, and it’s not closely related to any other bird on the planet.
But people have, for a long time, referred to it as a type of Stork. You’ll still come across references that call it a ‘Shoebill Stork.’ Once upon a time, in 1977, the well-know paleornithologist Alan Feduccia published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature. The paper was titled “The Whalebill is a Stork.” Feduccia based his argument on comparisons of the ear bone of the Shoebill with those of other birds. It turns out the Shoebill is not a stork. We know that now because genetic data has, more recently, given us a much better picture of which bird families are related to which. Genetic data tells us that Shoebills are definitely not storks.
In hindsight, the peremptory tone of that paper title, “The Whalebill is a Stork,” seems embarrassingly overconfident. Alan Feduccia is better known as the guy who has made a career out of denying that modern birds are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs. I won’t get into it now, but Feduccia has his own hypotheses about the origin of birds. Let’s just say he’s ruffled a few feathers in the community of mainstream ornithologists.
The Shoebill may not have close relatives, but its closest relative is the Hamerkop, another weird and wonderful African bird. Hamerkop means ‘hammer head’ in the Afrikaans language. This much smaller bird is chocolate brown and really does have a funny shaped head, with an odd swept back crest of feathers. The Hamerkop, too, is the only member of its family, Scopidae.
The two families, Balaenicipitidae and Scopidae belong to a larger lineage of birds, the order Pelecaniformes. It has a fairly large range in tropical, sub-saharan Africa, mostly east of the Congo basin. The largest populations are found in South Sudan. You can also find Shoebills in Uganda, Tanzania, and south to Zambia. Within this broad geographic range, Shoebills are distributed only locally. They’re spread thin across the continent, living their solitary lives in very specific habitats.
Habitat
They prefer to live in papyrus swamps. Papyrus is an aquatic sedge that forms tall stands in shallow freshwater habitats. In deeper water, it often forms a tangled floating mass of vegetation called sudd. You probably know that papyrus is the plant that Ancient Egyptians used to make paper. Papyrus grows in flooded swamps, along streambeds, or the margins of lakes like Lake Victoria.
Shoebills living in these swamps prefer to wade around in the more open channels, between stands of papyrus and other thick vegetation. With their broad wings, Shoebills need a bit of elbow room when they take to the sky. These channels through the swamp are sometimes the handiwork of hippos or elephants. The massive mammals ‘landscape’ the swamp as they forage and travel through the area.
Many of these wetland habitats preferred by the Shoebill experience seasonal flooding. When things start to dry out a bit—when the floodwaters recede—fish in the swamp become concentrated in the shrinking pools and channels. They become easy prey for hungry Shoebills.
Conservation
The IUCN Redlist has the Shoebill in the “vulnerable category.” It’s estimated that there are only 5,000 to 8,000 individuals. And this number is decreasing.
The primary threats causing the decline of Shoebills are hunting, nest disturbance, and habitat destruction and modification. Swamps are drained for agriculture and cattle trample nests and generally trash Shoebill habitats in general. Wildfires started by humans are a major problem as well.
Shoebills are also captured and traded, either illegally or legally, depending on the country. Captured individuals end up in zoos or in the hands of nefarious private collectors.
There are multiple efforts being made to help Shoebills. In places where this species’ habitat is protected, it has higher breeding success. So habitat protection is incredibly important. Local fishermen have been hired in at least one location to guard Shoebill nests from disturbance and poachers.
Ecotourism may also help Shoebills by giving local people an incentive to protect and celebrate these birds. Crazy birders like me will happily pay local guides to show them a Shoebill. It’s one of the most sought after bird species on the African continent.
Ideally, people sharing the land with Shoebills will come to see the power of ecotourism, to view the living birds and their healthy habitats as having the highest economic value.
Diet and Foraging
I described the unique, clog-like beak of the Shoebill earlier. Let’s look now at what and how the Shoebill eats. Its absolute favorite prey is the Marbled Lungfish, Protopterus aethiopicus. This is a thick, cylinder-shaped, long-bodied fish. It can get up to over 6 feet long, or 2 meters.
The Marbled Lungfish and other types of lungfish have a specialized respiratory system that allows them to breathe air when they need to. In other words, they have primitive lungs. Of all fish, lungfish are the most closely related to terrestrial vertebrates like reptiles, frogs, raccoons, and you.
Lungfish can survive well in freshwater habitats with low levels of oxygen in the water. When they can’t get enough oxygen from the water, lungfish just come to the surface to gulp some air into their little lungs. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that Shoebills tend to live in poorly oxygenated swamps, where all those juicy lungfish are right at the water surface. They’re ripe for the picking.
Other fish are certainly on the menu for Shoebills. Catfish, especially, but also tilapia. And look out amphibians, snakes, and baby crocodiles! It seems even turtles, rodents, and other birds like ducks will sometimes get swallowed by a Shoebill.
The Schuhschnabel —our Shoebill—has two primary foraging strategies. The first is to just sit and wait. Actually, ‘stand and wait.’ The bird just stands motionless and peers into the dark water at its feet. As an outside observer, you might think you’re looking at a statue of a bird.
In one Shoebill population, researchers quantified the time the birds spent engaging in various activities. It turned out that they are pretty low energy critters. They spend 85% of their time standing still or preening.
The second Shoebill foraging strategy is to ‘wade and walk.’ The bird methodically and languidly moves through its territory, again looking down into the water as it goes.
When the Shoebill zeroes in on its prey, it suddenly lunges forward with its massive head. It flaps its wings and snaps its bill on the prey animal in a burst of speed and power. The Shoebill’s forward momentum is so forceful that it may topple over after the attack. Researchers actually describe these attacks as ‘collapsing’ events.
The prey animal is engulfed along with a bunch of water and maybe some floating vegetation. The Shoebill will often tilt its head side to side to dump out the water and flotsam, while still gripping the prey.
The lungfish, catfish, or whatever is crushed in the mighty bill. The edges of the upper mandible are sharp and blade-like. Shoebills often use their sharp bill like a guillotine to decapitate their wriggling prey before swallowing it whole. The handling time—the amount of time it takes from capture to horking the prey down the gullet—is 4 to 7 minutes or so. So it takes quite a while to do all that water dumping and prey manipulating.
You might wonder if the Shoebill is itself prey for some other, larger animal. Apparently not. As far as I know, there aren’t any predators that eat adult Shoebills. At least not with any regularity. Maybe a Nile Crocodile would opportunistically snatch an unwary Shoebill. Young Shoebills are probably more vulnerable. And their eggs may be eaten by a variety of sneaky predators.
While an adult Shoebill is mostly immune from predation, it may still have its lunch stolen by another animal. A study of Shoebills in a Tanzanian population found that 47% of their successful prey captures were stolen by African Fish Eagles. An eagle could see a collapsing Shoebill from a distance, then it would swoop in to rob the catch. In over 100 instances of this kleptoparasitism, the victimized Shoebill never retaliated. It just gave up its lunch to the eagle.
Breeding
Unlike storks, herons, and pelicans, Shoebills do not nest in breeding colonies. They are very solitary birds. They form monogamous pairs in the breeding season and both parents care for the chicks.
But these birds are such loners that the male and female are rarely ever at the nest at the same time. The nest is made of grassy vegetation on a mound of floating plants—a big mess of sudd. Or the nest might be built on a small island. It’s big, up to 3 meters across. Shoebills tend to place these nests out of sight, deep in the papyrus stands.
There are one to three eggs. Two is typical. To keep the eggs cool in the tropical heat, the parents will fill their capacious beaks with water and pour it out over the eggs. The parents tend to their nest for 95 to 105 days before the chick fledges. Usually only one chick is likely to survive. The chick that hatches earlier is usually given more food and attention. It gets stronger while its younger sibling gets weaker. With seeming cruel indifference, the parents eventually ignore the weaker nestling. The older chick may even actively attack the younger one. It’s pretty brutal and sad. They have these behaviors because they work, in the evolutionary sense.
A young Shoebill stays with its parents for at least another week after it leaves the nest. Perhaps much longer. But, eventually, it’s left to fend for itself. It will take about 3 years for a Shoebill to reach sexual maturity. Estimates of a Shoebill’s lifespan range from 35 to 50 years. Birds in captivity are more likely to live longer.