Toco Toucan

The toco toucan lives only in South America, from the savannas of the Guianas south through Brazil, Bolivia, southeastern Peru and Paraguay to northern Argentina and Uruguay. Unlike most of its relatives, it is not a bird of dense rainforest. It prefers semi open landscapes with scattered trees: the Brazilian cerrado, where it is especially common, the wetlands of the Pantanal, gallery forests along rivers, palm groves, dry woodland, forest edges and secondary forest. It also visits farms, orchards and the edges of towns, and in many Brazilian cities it is seen in parks and gardens. It lives from the lowlands up to about 1,750 meters. In recent decades the species has been expanding south into new areas of Argentina and northern Uruguay, perhaps helped by forest clearing that opens the landscape it likes. Because it avoids closed forest, the toco is mostly absent from the heart of the Amazon, where other toucans, such as the white throated and channel billed toucans, take its place.

The toco toucan is the largest member of the toucan family. Adults measure about 55 to 65 cm, around 56 cm on average, and weigh roughly 500 to 860 grams. A large part of that length is the bill: 17 to 21.5 cm in males and 16 to 20 cm in females, about a third of the bird's total length. The bill is yellow orange, with fiery red tones along the top, a black band at the base and a big black oval spot at the tip, a pattern no other toucan has. The plumage is glossy black, set off by a white throat and upper chest, a white rump that flashes in flight and bright red feathers under the tail. The eye is brown, ringed with blue skin and surrounded by a patch of sulfur yellow to orange bare skin. Males and females look the same, although males usually have longer bills. Young birds have a shorter, duller bill, and it takes them a few months to grow the full adult bill. In flight it is unmistakable: a black body with a huge orange bill out front.

The giant bill looks heavy, but it is not. Its outer layer is a thin shell of keratin, the same material as human fingernails, and the inside is a light foam of bony fibers and air pockets, which makes it strong enough to use but only a small part of the bird's weight. It lets the toco reach fruit at the tips of thin branches that could not hold its weight, and then toss each piece back into its throat with a flick of the head. It also helps it reach into nests and tree holes, and it may impress mates and rivals. The most surprising use was discovered in a study published in 2009: the bill works as a radiator. It is full of blood vessels, and the toucan can send more or less blood to it to control its temperature. When the bird is hot, the bill releases heat, in some conditions up to four times the heat the bird produces at rest; when it is cool, blood flow drops to save heat, and at night the bird tucks the bill under its wing.

The toco toucan is mainly a fruit eater, and a flexible one. It eats a wide variety of fleshy fruits, including figs, guavas and palm fruits, and readily visits orchards for oranges and other cultivated fruit. It also eats flowers, insects, spiders, small lizards and, especially in the breeding season, the eggs and chicks of other birds, which it pulls out of nests with its long bill. In the Pantanal it is known to raid the nests of hyacinth macaws and buff necked ibises. That makes it a curious double agent for the hyacinth macaw: the toco is one of its main egg predators, but it is also one of the main seed dispersers of the manduvi tree, the tree the macaws depend on for nesting holes. Because toucans swallow fruits whole and pass the seeds intact, often far from the parent tree, they are important for the spread of many plants of the cerrado and the Pantanal. The toco usually feeds in pairs or small groups, moving from tree to tree with a slow, undulating flight.

Toco toucans usually move in pairs or small groups, keeping in touch with deep, croaking calls and a dry rattle. They are not strong fliers: they alternate a few quick wingbeats with short glides and prefer to hop along branches or fly short distances. When two toucans meet, they sometimes fence gently with their bills or toss fruit to each other, behaviors that seem to strengthen social bonds. At night they sleep in tree holes, resting the bill on the back and folding the tail up over it, which turns the bird into a compact ball. Pairs nest in cavities in trees, but they also use holes in termite mounds and earth banks, places most other toucans do not use. The female lays two to four white eggs, and both parents incubate them for 17 to 18 days. The chicks hatch naked and blind, with pads on their heels that protect them from the rough nest floor, and they leave after 43 to 52 days, fed by both parents first with insects and then with more fruit.

The toco is one of about 40 species in the toucan family, Ramphastidae, which lives only in the American tropics, from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. The family includes the big toucans of the genus Ramphastos, the smaller and more slender aracaris, and the little green toucanets and mountain toucans of the Andes. Among the big toucans, the keel billed toucan of southern Mexico and Central America, named for its green, orange, red and blue bill, is the national bird of Belize. The channel billed toucan lives in the forests of the Guianas, Venezuela and Trinidad, and the white throated toucan, almost as big as the toco, lives in the Amazon rainforest, where its yapping call is one of the typical sounds of the canopy. Aracaris, such as the chestnut eared aracari that shares the Pantanal and the cerrado with the toco, are smaller, more colorful and more social. Toucans are not related to the hornbills of Africa and Asia, which evolved similar large bills separately.

The IUCN lists the toco toucan as Least Concern. It is fairly common across most of its huge range, and unlike rainforest toucans, it can benefit from some forest clearing, because it prefers open landscapes with scattered trees and adapts to farms, orchards and towns. Its range has even been expanding south into new parts of Argentina and Uruguay. That does not mean it faces no problems. In some areas it is hunted, and it is one of the toucans most captured for the illegal pet trade, which takes wild birds and their chicks from nests. Large scale conversion of the cerrado to soybean fields and cattle pasture removes the fruiting trees and old trunks it needs, and wildfires in the Pantanal, such as the huge fires of 2020, have burned through its habitat. Protecting the cerrado and the Pantanal, and keeping toucans in the wild rather than in cages, are the best ways to make sure this icon of South American skies stays common.