It is not exactly known why it has deserved this last epithet, maybe due to the slight ruffle of the feathers on the nape that creates the impression of a fake crown or due to the massive size of its structure that renders it the most powerful being in its territory, the king of the swamp, giving new credit to the impression gotten by Gould himself when started its first studies. The scientific name of the genus Balaeniceps comes from the melting of two Latin terms, “balaena” = whale and “ceps” = head, whilst, always from Latin, the species rex means king. Ornothologists relate it first to the storks then the pelicans, but its shape leads to think to the past huge reptilians © Giuseppe Mazza All information and the scientific references of this bird refer to its huge and strange bill. Surely archaic species, of prehistoric look. As we shall see, it lives in inacessible locations, uncomfortable, out of reach and crossable only after an exhausting zigzagging among reed beds and immense flooded lands of high papyruses that practically obscure the vision even a few metres far away. Initially considered as quite rare, it was instead understood that its scarity was due by the incredible discretion this bird keeps during its life besides the environment where it lives that renders it invisible and poorly approachable. Statement that moved the curiosity of all the scientists of the time for many years and that originated recognition missions looking for this bird. From its discovery to the present, this so strange and particular bird, has been subject of studies and classifications that have initially deemed it as belonging to the group of the storks, then to the pelicans, then again to the storks and finally with the last studies through the researches on the DNA, has been finally allocated to the Pelecaniformes approaching it as features to the Common Umbrette or Hammerhead stork ( Scopus umbretta) also living in the African continent.Īppears suddenly and then goes into the luxuriant and impenetrable vegetation of the African swamps in a vast belt close to Equator © Giuseppe Mazza Gould himself when he saw in the middle of the XIX century the first specimen in the collection of a Nottingham gentleman who had taken it in Sudan on the banks of the Upper Nile and on which did the scientific classification, was so strongly impressed and so much astonished to say that that being “was the most extraordinary bird he had ever seen since many years”. The Shoebill ( Balaeniceps rexGould, 1850) belongs to the order of the Pelecaniformes and to the family of the Balaenicipitidae and is the only extant species belonging to this family and to its genus. It called it whalehead stork and scientifically assigned it to the genus Baleniceps instead of Balaeniceps committing one of the usual Latin mispellings so much common in that century. Shy, good-natured but with massive hooked bill, Balaeniceps rex is a legend bird © Giuseppe Mazza The shoe-billed stork or more simply, the shoebill, does not need particular references for being remembered by the ornithologists or by the lovers in this matter.Īs soon as this name is pronounced, immediately the eyes of those knowing it or having heard of it light up of curiosity and of wonder due to the morphological particularities of this bird and even more for the rarity that until a few decades ago placed it as an invisible and little traceable being or perhaps also as a disappearing species.Īlready the first explorers of the East Africa lands, had met this strange bird and had the occasion to recall it in their reports, especially as the territories where it lives were the epicentre of lots of missions of nineteenth-century explorers looking for the sources of the Nile River or of the Mountains of the Moon, rightly places where lives this very strange kind of bird.Īlso the books of ornithology of the previous centuries were talking of it and did reproduce its features with precision, seen that the identification at the time was a very easy thing: a gunshot to the specimen met and immediately they had the way to figure out what it was.įiguier made a very nice description in his book The Birds of the second half of the ‘800 with a so precise and detailed engraving as to seem a present work.
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