Bird Made Famous By The Lion King Is Nearly Extinct

One of the mainstays of Disney animated films are the animal side characters and this holds true even for the animated films where all of the characters are animals, such as the iconic film The Lion King. That particular film had a number of beloved characters among them Zazu, the yellow-billed hornbill who is the wise and trusted advisor to Simba and his pride of lions. The real-life, yellow-billed hornbill birds became very popular following The Lion King, but now the beautiful birds are nearly extinct. As reported by Newsweek, the birds are being wiped out by climate change.

According to new research, it's global warming that has drastically impacted the breeding success of the southern, yellow-billed hornbill, a bird typically found in the scrub and dry woodland areas in South Africa. The author of the new study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Nicholas Pattinson of the University of Capetown wrote that there's evidence that higher temperatures are impacting a variety of animals, and the yellow-billed hornbills that his team studied between 2008 and 2019 in particular are hard hit.

"During the monitoring period, sub-lethal effects of high temperatures – including compromised foraging, provisioning, and body mass maintenance – reduced the chance of hornbills breeding successfully or even breeding at all," Pattinson wrote.

The data in the study tells a pretty grim tale. When the study compared the first three breeding seasons (between 2008 and 2011) and the last three (from 2016 to 2019), there was huge drop in the successful raising and fledging of at least one chick — from 58 percent to 17 percent – while the average chicks produced each breeding attempt also dramatically decreased from 1.1 percent to 0.4 percent. No successful attempts were recorded above the air temperature of 35.7 degrees Celsius (96.26 degrees Fahrenheit.)

What this means for the yellow-billed hornbills is dire. The study goes on to state that, with current warming predictions for the area, the birds will not be able to successfully breed in the region during the entire breeding season by 2027 — which means the birds could go extinct by then as well.

Currently conservation efforts across of variety of groups are underway to try to save the yellow-billed hornbill, including one by the San Diego Zoo as well as the Hornbill Adopt-A-Nest program. You can check out more about those conservation efforts here.