Welcome to You Ask Andy

Carolyn Balog, age 12, of Lethbridge, Alta., Canada, for her question:

WHAT SORT OF BIRD IS THE TOUCAN?

His outlandish beak qualifies him as one of the most remarkable members of the bird world. Every bird, of course, has a beak used to grasp things and to serve as knife and fork. The shape and size of the bill is designed to cope with the diet of the species, such as meat or seeds. But nobody can explain exactly why the talkative toucan has that gaudy, oversize beak.

The toucan belongs to the leafy jungles of tropical America. Where there is one, there are sure to be more, for toucans are very sociable birds. There the gaudy fellows sit among the gaudy boughs, nibbling berries and carrying on noisy conversations. Their favorite word, naturally, sounds like tou can, tou can. However they also have larger vocabularies including kee you tedick tedeck tedeck—which they yell at the tops of their voices.

The largest of the 37 toucan species measures 24 inches, including his outlandish bill, which resembles a couple of painted bananas. In the smaller species, the bill is often as big as the rest of the bird. Most of them wear basic black plumage enhanced with vivid vests and brightly colored eye patches. All of them are intelligent and very curious. When tamed they learn to repeat a few human words.

When you look at a toucan, you feel sure that his enormous bill must be heavy and cumbersome. Not at all. The inside is made of porous material, riddled with hollow pockets. The remarkable bill is very light, however, it is by no means fragile. The outside is a thin shell of very sturdy material ¬and the whole thing is quite manageable, at least to a toucan.

Not too much is known about the family life of the average toucan. This is because the usually chatty female suddenly decides to become secretive. She hides her two, three or four white eggs in a hollow tree. The parents take turns at incubating duties and the smaller species hatch in about 16 days. Some observers suspect that several females may share the same nest or, at least, the same hollow tree.

The baby chicks are naked and blind and no, they do not have full size toucan bills. They develop more slowly than most baby birds and it is six or seven weeks before they grow any feathers. Their bills are somewhat larger than those of most chicks and reach the proper toucan size when the young birds become mature.

 

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