Breeding Biology of Hornbill

Eastern Himalaya Project at NCF Bangalore is monitoring Rainforest trees to study their phenology for over 20 years now. I was a part of a field project for 10 months in 2014 where we walked already laid out transects and recorded the phenology state of marked trees. These surveys were carried out fortnightly. I am currently involved in analyzing this data to explore patterns like seasonality, synchrony and consistency in their flowering. We are also trying to compare shifts in these cycles in the last 20 years. We also collected data for hornbill diet data during the breeding season. Hornbill is a key- stone species for the dispersal of fruit trees in rainforests.

I conducted a 6-hour long nest watch every day to record the hornbill’s diet. We aim to compare the shift in phenology pattern with the shift in hornbill’s breeding cycle. This project also focuses on seed dispersal by hornbills in northeastern rainforests. Once we recorded information on which tree species hornbills visit and hence aid in seed dispersal, the next step was to understand the range or distance up to which they can disperse seeds. For this, we tagged 7 Great hornbills individuals (males) with GPS tags and collected their movement data. I was involved in fieldwork during capturing and tagging of hornbill individuals, setting up GPS tags and receiver and manuscript writing.

Publications:

1. Naniwadekar R., Rathore A., Shukla U., Datta A. (2020). Patterns of roost site use by Asian hornbills and implications for seed dispersal. Biotropica doi- https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.13039

2. Naniwadekar R., Rathore A., Shukla U., Chaplod S., Datta A. (2019). How far do Asian forest hornbills disperse seeds: the role of season, sex and species. Acta Oecologica. 101 (103482)

3. Naniwadekar, R., Chaplod, S., Datta, A., Rathore, A., Sridhar, H. (2019). Large frugivores matter: Insights from network and seed dispersal effectiveness approaches. Journal of Animal Ecology. 88(8):1250-1262

4. Shukla, U., Naniwadekar, R., Rathore, A. ,Datta, A. (2018). Variability in gut passage times of Asian hornbills for large-seeded tree species. Sarawak Museum Journal. 79 (100). Dryad Dataset doihttps://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5br2q79 1. 2. 3