Profile
In flight
Tropical Birds
Toco Toucan
Ramphastos toco
- uncommon
- 24 km/h
- Least Concern
That enormous beak carries messages in style. Nature's most oversized mailbag.
- Population
- Not numerically quantified by IUCN/BirdLife; described qualitatively as having a large range and being common, with NatGeo noting a declining trend from hunting/pet-trade pressure (no mature-individual count located in any accessible source)
- Habitat
- Semi-open habitats rather than dense rainforest interior: gallery forests, savannas, woodlands, secondary forest, forest edges near water, and Brazilian cerrado/Pantanal wetlands, up to about 1,750 m elevation
- Fun fact
- Despite its huge size, the Toco Toucan's bill is largely hollow (a lightweight keratin honeycomb over thin bone struts), making it light enough to carry while also acting as a thermal radiator — controllable blood flow lets it dump up to 30-60% of the bird's resting heat production through the bill.
- Range
- Endemic to South America: the Guianas (French Guiana, Suriname) and Brazil south through Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru to northern Argentina and Uruguay, with an apparently expanding southward range
- Diet
- Primarily frugivorous (figs, guavas, oranges, peppers and other fleshy fruit); opportunistically also eats insects, and the eggs and nestlings of other birds (including, per Animal Diversity Web, hyacinth macaw nestlings)
- Size
- 0.56 m
- Lifespan
- 20 years
