Colours of Wildlife: Green Wood-Hoopoe

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Green Wood-Hoopoe

Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"

Green Wood-Hoopoe by Willem


Another African special! The Green Wood-Hoopoe, Phoeniculus purpureus, is part of a small group of birds that only occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The wood-hoopoes, and their close relatives the Scimitarbills, are few in number and not very diverse. There are four wood-hoopoe species that live in savannahs, woodland and dry scrubby regions, and two species (each with a few different sub-species or forms) that occur in moist rainforests. There are only three scimitarbill species, and they all live in savannah, woodland and scrub. All of these birds are small to medium-sized (23-46 cm/9"-18" in overall length) with proportionally long tails, glossy black plumage, prominent white markings on the wings and/or tails, and long, decurved bills. They are close relatives of the hoopoes. They are a bit more distantly related to kingfishers, rollers, bee-eaters and hornbills.

Cackling Collectives


Green wood-hoopoes nearly always occur in flocks, mostly related birds – a pair of parents and their offspring from several seasons. The birds are highly attuned to one another. A flock can be heard from far away by its shrill, maniacal cackling. If one bird starts, the others soon join in. In Afrikaans, this bird is called a 'Kakelaar', translatable as 'Cackler', or 'Chatterer'. Various African languages also name them for this, likening their calls to the shrieks of hysterical women. It's a pleasant sound to me, actually; if ever I hear it in the bush, I excitedly try to track down the flock of wood-hoopoes. They're amusing to see and watch.


The calling is just one part of a variety of social behaviours of these birds. The flocks move as a unit, methodically working over one tree, and then flying together to the next. They eat mainly insects, which they find on the twigs and bark of the tree, or which they extract from crevices with their long, fine bills. They are dextrous and scramble up and down trunks and branches, being able to cling to the bark almost like a woodpecker or nuthatch. Birds in a flock preen each other; they perform bowing displays as they call, waving their tails up and down; they also perform 'flag waving', grasping a piece of bark, lichen, twig or berry in their beaks and waving it up and down. They do this especially when they meet with a different flock at a territory boundary; the noise in such an encounter can be cacophonic.


It seems that group size is related to the availability of roosting sites. Wood-hoopoes roost in tree cavities, the entire group squashing themselves together into a single hole. Where more suitable holes exist, groups are smaller; with fewer holes, the groups become bigger because more them have to share.


Wood-hoopoes work together to raise their babies. The 'parents', the oldest pair, are dominant, and the rest sub-ordinate in rank according to age. If one of the original parents should die, a bird next in rank will take his/her place. This means, technically, incest most of the time, though there seems to be little harm happening from this in-breeding. Once formed, pairs are faithful to each other. When the female gets ready to breed, the male will keep close to her, guarding her from the attentions of the other male flock members. He courts her with weaving motions of his body and side-to-side flicking of his tail. He preens her and scratches her back with his foot, then they mate, for a minute or more, which is long for a bird.

Noisome Nests


Wood-hoopoes nest in tree holes, such as ones made by woodpeckers or barbets, or small, natural tree holes. They don't excavate these themselves, their long bills being relatively weak. Only the female goes into the nest. She lays her eggs and then stay on them, very much as in the hornbills, except she's not actually 'imprisoned'. Her mate and her older children then bring her food. She lays two to five eggs. These are attractively bluish-coloured on first laying, but rapidly become stained. Wood-hoopoes are notorious for the foulness and stench of their nests. They don't remove their own or their chick's droppings. It may even be that the noisomeness of these nests are a defensive measure against potential predators; how the birds themselves tolerate it, we don't know.


Newly hatched wood-hoopoe chicks are blind and only sparsely covered in a whitish down. They have prominent white gapes, so that their open mouths look like white circles to make them easier to see in the darkness of the nests when they beg for food. The mother will take food from her mate or the helpers and then pass it to her chicks; later, the helpers themselves will feed the chicks directly if they can. Wood-hoopoe males are larger than females and have longer bills; this means that they catch somewhat different kinds of insects, making a greater variety of food items available to their chicks.


At the age of a week, the chicks look like little hedgehogs. Their first feathers grow clasped inside spiky quill sheaths. These remain for two more weeks, and then the actual feathers emerge. The chicks will defend themselves if they feel threatened, trying to intimidate predators by hissing and swaying their bodies, by pecking at it, and (if the stink of the nest wasn't bad enough) by squirting poop at it, or by releasing an awful-smelling fluid from their preen glands.

Messelirrisor halcyrostris by Willem


I leave you with a picture showing the ancient origins of wood-hoopoes. This is little Messelirrisor halcyrostris, close to the origin of hoopoes and wood-hoopoes, and also that of their other relatives the hornbills, bee-eaters, rollers and kingfishers. It lived in Germany about 47 million years ago, and its fossils were excellently preserved in the Messel Pit. It was a tiny bird, only about 10 cm/4" in total length. Its fossils show prominent bars on its tail. Other, more fully evolved wood-hoopoes were found in Europe about twenty million years later, another example of how many bird groups with restricted distributions today used to be more widespread in the past.

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