In defense of the shoebill

Last night many people were gripped by the BBC’s visually stunning new wildlife series Africa. As has been the wont of wildlife filmmakers since the dawn of time, the Africa crew toyed with our emotions throughout. Baby gorillas stared the camera in its lens and the viewer in her primeval ovaries, a drought-starved baby elephant breathed its last as its mother tried to nudge it back to life tenderly with a foot the size of a tree stump, later a new baby elephant frolicked in rain-refreshed pastures (you could almost hear strains of Sir Elton John’s Circle of Life begin to play beneath the already intrusive underscoring). But the thing that riled Twitter the most was the outright evil of the shoebill.

A shoebill, not a human

A nest of two chicks, one of the chicks was a few days older than the other, its head-start in life meant that it was bigger and could muscle its way to food ahead of its sibling, meaning that it grew faster and the size gap increased. As the difference grew, the larger chick got even more food, and eventually, seizing every advantage while the mother was away searching for catfish in the limpid pools of a dense swamp, we saw the large chick pummelling the other with its massive beak. Feathers flying, the weaker chick seemed done for. But then the mother returned to restore order…oh, wait. The mother returned, but shunning the weaker embattled chick she gives the bigger one food and lavishes all her care on this avian Cain. WHY? WHY CAN’T SHE LOOK AFTER THE WEAK? Twitter was alive with people shocked and appalled: for at least half an hour shoebills were officially more despicable, less caring, and warranted our opprobrium more than the Coalition Government on welfare-reform Tuesday.

But what people seem to forget, easily done given the nature of the documentary and its wanton emotional toying with the viewer, is that THESE ARE BIRDS. It would be easy to point out 101 things more inherently preposterous, destructive, uncaring, and designed to screw over our fellow human beings that people do before midday each day (most of them on the tube in London), but that would be continuing in the anthropomorphism of the show. I could also point out that in every series of Springwatch, we watch in fear that the barn owls won’t find enough voles and the older chicks will eat their way through their younger and smaller siblings to make up the calorie deficit – so this siblicide is nothing out of the ordinary, and many birds lay extra eggs as insurance policies, expecting that some offspring will not make it. But rather, I’d like to take a paragraph to celebrate the wonderful shoebill. A bird that, when  I first saw it on a nature documentary as a youngster, helped to spark my interest in evolution and ecology.

Shoebills (Balaeniceps rex) are massive long-legged wading birds. Resembling a cross between a heron and a pelican designed by Jim Henson and viewed in a distorting mirror, they are unmistakable with anything else and utterly unique. Their uniqueness belies their evolutionary history, which is something of a mystery. The birds are in a taxonomic family on their own. On the basis of their shape and feeding habits (stalking fish in the reedbeds of East Africa’s swamps) they have been allied with storks and herons, but DNA analysis suggests they are more closely related to pelicans. Their closest living relative is almost certainly the hammerkop, another curious African bird also of murky evolutionary affinities. Shoebills specialise in hunting catfish and lungfish in shallow or dwindling pools of vast swamps; these fish come to the surface to take gulps of air, at which point a patiently waiting shoebill will strike. Their massive bills (which give them both their English name and their latin genus name Balaeniceps [meaning “whale head”]) enable them to capture larger fish than other stalking waders such as herons and storks, and unlike these birds they can also tear larger prey apart rather than having to swallow it whole. The fossil record of shoebill ancestors is sparse, with some clear relatives from 30 million to 25 million years ago, but not much else. Given their remarkable size, striking appearance, and impenetrable habitat, it’s no surprise the shoebill is one of the species top on the list of any birdwatcher visiting Africa. And when you watch Africa, just remember, they’re only doing what they need to do to survive. They may not be cute, or dying, but they are pretty fricking amazing if you ask me.