A Troubling Rise in the Grisly Trade of a Spectacular African Bird

By Adam Welz

November 24, 2025

This article was originally published at the Yale School of the Environment

A black-casqued hornbill. ONDREJ PROSICKY / ALAMY

Researchers are finding a disturbing uptick in the trade of African hornbills and their body parts in West African voodoo markets and globally on the internet. Conservationists want international protections for these birds, which play a key role in Africa’s forest ecosystems.

In late August the Nigeria Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society received photos of primate and bird parts recently seized by the Nigerian Customs Service in Oron, a small port city in southeastern Nigeria, some 20 miles from the border with Cameroon. The images showed 11 blackened ape heads — a gorilla and 10 chimpanzees of various ages — plus 34 ape hands, a pile of dirty parrot and turaco heads, and 34 equally filthy heads of hornbills.

The hornbill heads surprised Andrew Dunn, senior technical advisor to the WCS Nigeria Program. He has done conservation work in the Nigeria-Cameroon border area since 1992 and seen many poached and illegally traded animals, but, he says, “we’ve not seen hornbills being smuggled until just this year.” In March, Nigerian customs had interdicted a man at a nearby land border carrying a similar shipment from Cameroon — 346 bird heads, of which 128 were hornbills, along with two chimpanzee heads and eight chimp limbs.

The larger hornbill species, with their long, thick beaks, are among the most important tree seed dispersers in African forests.

In the wild, large, bizarre-looking hornbills are not only a delight to see, they also play a key role in Africa’s ecosystems as seed-spreaders for trees, helping forests regenerate. But hornbills are vanishing from jungles and woodlands across large areas of Africa, victims of little-known but rapidly growing trades in both live hornbills and their body parts, especially their heads. Conservationists working to keep them flying on the continent face daunting obstacles, including a lack of awareness of threats to the birds, very little legal protection for them, and pervasive ignorance of their importance to the forests they live in and thus, ultimately, to the global climate system.

All is not lost for Africa’s hornbills, though. In early December, in Uzbekistan, a major meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has the chance to vote to partially restrict trade in eight of the most-targeted species of African hornbills, which conservationists hope will begin to revive the birds’ fortunes.

Hornbill heads seized earlier this year by Nigerian customs officials. NIGERIA CUSTOMS SERVICE

Millions upon millions of trees in forests around the world have emerged from the poop of backboned animals. Stated more formally: Huge numbers of tree species are not able to reproduce efficiently without vertebrates eating and digesting their fruits, then defecating their seeds on the ground. In the tropics, about 90 percent of woody plant species produce animal-dispersed seeds. (Wind, water, or self-dispersed seeds are more common at cooler latitudes.) Numerous studies show the vital role of animals like monkeys, bats, elephants, and birds in maintaining tropical forest health and restoring damaged forestland.

In African tropical forests, among the most important tree seed dispersers are a handful of species of hornbills, spectacular birds with long, thick beaks topped with a hard structure called a casque that is especially prominent in males. Africa has 32 species of hornbill, and another 32 are native to Asia. Although most hornbill species feed mainly on small animals — insects, lizards, mice, etc. — ornithologists have long recognized that tree fruits dominate the diets of eight larger species. Among these enthusiastic frugivores in Africa are the black-casqued hornbill (Ceratogymna atrata), the yellow-casque hornbill (Ceratogymna elata), and the white-thighed hornbill (Bycanistes albotibialis), collectively called “the Big Three” by conservationists.

Hunters can wipe out hornbill populations in short order, and it can take many years to repopulate a forest because the birds breed slowly.

Thomas Smith, a professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at University of California, Los Angeles, has spent decades along with students and colleagues studying the ecological role of hornbills and other animals in African forests. Much of their research has been in the Dja Faunal Reserve, more than 2,000 square miles of conserved Congo Basin rainforest in southern Cameroon. Transmitter tags have revealed that hornbills “move around seasonally,” says Smith. “About 90 percent of the large hornbills leave the Dja reserve during lean food times.” They can fly tens or hundreds of miles away — “We even had one bird cross the border to Gabon,” he says — but almost always return to their home ranges when fruits ripen there.

Nicholas Russo, a recent PhD student of Smith’s, says that large, dense-wooded tree species that store large volumes of carbon tend to have large seeds, and thus need large animals to disperse them. (Small animals can’t ingest large seeds whole and poop them out intact and viable.) He tracked black-casqued and white-thighed hornbills in the Dja area and found that they could easily disperse seeds up to 12 miles from parent trees. Even though hornbills and other disperser species eat some of the same fruits, Russo says that hornbills “can move seeds very far and very quickly, in a way that many other species can’t.” He found that white-thighed hornbills often fly across roads and agricultural fields close to villages, and so can carry seeds from mature forest to degraded and isolated forest pockets that mammalian seed dispersers can’t reach. When large mammals get hunted out — as is happening across central and west Africa — the burden of restoring forests and maintaining their carbon storage capacity is increasingly borne by large hornbills.

A white-thighed hornbill in Western Uganda. LEROY FRANCIS / HEMIS.FR VIA ALAMY

But large hornbills are extremely vulnerable to humans wielding chainsaws. Hornbills nest in tree cavities, and, unlike woodpeckers, can’t excavate these cavities themselves, so are forced to find large holes like those formed when a branch dies and rots out of a large tree trunk. Russo says that good nest sites are rare, easily lost to logging, and are not to be found in young, regrowing forest.

The Big Three are also easy targets for gun-bearing hunters. The birds gather at fruiting trees, where they can be picked off one by one, and readily approach hunters who mimic their loud calls. Hunters can wipe out hornbill populations in short order, and it can take many years to repopulate a forest even if good nest sites remain because they breed very slowly; an established pair raises only one or two young a year, says Russo. Research shows that large hornbills were shot out from the vast majority of their range in Ghana by hunters during the 1990s and early 2000s, and the birds have still not repopulated the areas where they were lost.

An ornithologist says a guide told him that newly arrived Chinese buyers were paying good money for hornbill heads.

Francis Guetse, a Cameroonian ornithologist, says that hunters did not traditionally pursue hornbills in his country, only rarely shooting them for the pot when better alternatives were not available. (Thomas Smith of UCLA concurs, saying he almost never saw hornbills for sale at roadside wildlife trading stalls when he began working in Cameroon in the 1980s). But that has changed radically in recent years. 

Guetse first encountered dedicated hornbill hunting while helping with a forest survey around Mont Nlonako in western Cameroon in 2022, when a guide told him that newly arrived Chinese buyers were paying good money for hornbill heads. He returned to survey hunters and their associates in the area. Of the 95 questioned, 69 targeted hornbills, and 91 percent of those said the primary reason was not for food but to sell heads to local middlemen or foreign dealers. The hunters confirmed to Guetse that the trade was new, adding that Nigerians also came to buy hornbill heads soon after the Chinese pioneered the trade. But Guetse’s respondents did not know where the heads were taken or what they were used for. 

The Akodessewa Fetish Market, in Lome, Togo. ROBERTHARDING / ALAMY

Researchers say that many of the hornbill heads obtained in Cameroon are almost certainly destined for vodun (also known as voodoo or fetish) markets elsewhere in West Africa, where hornbill heads and feathers have traditionally been used in ritual ceremonies. Vodun is supported by some West African leaders, particularly in the country of Benin and nearby nations. A network of fetish markets supplies vodun practitioners with animal and plant parts. These markets — buoyed by West Africa’s rapidly growing human population and urban boom — are expanding fast and sourcing products ever further afield.

Researchers are currently finding hornbill heads being sold in fetish markets in Benin and Ghana. A new survey by the International Bird Conservation Partnership shows that the number of stalls in Togo’s largest fetish market has doubled and the variety of bird species on offer has increased more than fivefold since the last surveys were published in 2015 and 2018. “The wildlife trade in Africa is exploding because of modern communications,” says Nico Arcilla of the IBCP, explaining that fetish dealers who can no longer find desired species in their own countries — because they’ve been wiped out — use platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp to source products from across the continent.

Researchers have found numerous hornbill skulls and skeletons for sale in online curiosity stores, as well as live hornbills.

The growing trade in African hornbills extends well beyond the continent. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service records the U.S. wildlife trade — legal and illegal — via its Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) database, and this showed a sharp increase in African hornbill “encounters” in 2023, which has been sustained to date. There are very few legal restrictions on importing African hornbills to the U.S., and researchers have found numerous skulls and skeletons for sale in online curiosity stores, as well as live hornbills on avicultural sites (the latter selling for as much as $16,500 per pair).

Daniella Skinner, conservation and research manager at the Mabula Ground Hornbill Project in South Africa, has been probing the online trade in African hornbills. She says that African sellers tend to use different online platforms than European and U.S. sellers and portray their products very differently. African sellers, mostly in Cameroon and Nigeria, use Facebook to build networks of wholesale buyers internationally, and post crude photos showing large numbers of hornbill heads, often dirty and rotting. European and U.S. sellers favor Instagram, Etsy, and eBay, where they show individual, cleaned, beautifully mounted hornbill skulls, often advertised as “legal” or “not CITES listed.” European and U.S. buyers, she says, “don’t see the ugly part of the trade.” 

Online listings for hornbills and hornbill parts. ADAPTED FROM TINSMAN ET. AL

Records collected by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria shows significant recent trade on that continent, much of it live birds being transhipped to the Middle East and South Asia, but also numerous skulls and skeletons being sold in trendy interior decor stores as display items. “Many European sellers advertise their skulls as “sustainably sourced” or “captive bred.” says Kees Groot, a hornbill expert affiliated with the Copenhagen Zoo, “but there’s no way the European captive population is able to supply so many skulls.” He notes that a database covering animals held in almost all the zoos in Europe shows that only two black-casqued hornbills were hatched in European zoos within the last year, and accredited zoos don’t sell body parts of dead animals. 

What records don’t show is a recent increase in trade in Asian hornbills. Almost all Asian hornbill species were listed under CITES in 1992 after a dramatic surge in poaching and trade, particularly of the helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil). The listing required all countries to record the transit of these species across national borders. (Many Asian hornbills subsequently gained additional, in-country legal protections.) U.S. LEMIS data show that trade in Asian species has not increased since their CITES listing in 1992 — the listing appears to have been effective — but trade in African species has increased significantly. African species now make up about 95 percent of the U.S. hornbill trade, and current levels of U.S. trade of just the 8 large seed-dispersing African species are more than one-and-a-half times greater than the international trade in all Asian species in 1992.

Nigeria and other African countries have proposed giving international protections to the key hornbill species.

Conservationists are concerned that they’re not getting a complete picture of the trade and threats to hornbills because many countries (in Africa and internationally) don’t legally protect the birds and so impose no obligation to record or restrict sales, imports, or exports. The extent of hornbill trade in China, for example, is currently unknown. Hornbill research is hugely underfunded — even the population numbers of many species remain unknown. Without better information, conservation efforts are likely to be misdirected and fail. 

Listing the birds under CITES will provide much better data, says Lucy Kemp, co-chair of the IUCN SSC Hornbill Specialist Group. But achieving a listing can be challenging. The process is complex and political. To consider a listing, CITES requires data to show that trade is threatening that species, but such data is often hard to obtain without first getting a listing. Nonetheless, Nigeria, supported by a group of other African countries, has proposed placing the eight fruit-eating species of large African hornbills (including the Big Three) on Appendix 2 of the CITES treaty, which would impose permit and data-keeping requirements for exports and imports. A vote on the proposal is scheduled for early December, when the next CITES Conference of the Parties will be taking place in Uzbekistan. 

Kemp and others are campaigning hard to secure the required two-thirds of international delegates’ support, which they hope will unlock more awareness, more research, and more conservation action for African hornbills. “We’re not going to restore forests without them,” she says.