This morning we had a call scheduled with “Uncle” Lance and as we were about to start the video chat there was a whoosh from our coconut tree. Of course we thought back to our simian visitors a few months ago and rushed to close the doors upstairs…but there we saw that our visitors were avian, rather than simian, in nature.

We think these were Wreathed Hornbills based on looking up the birds of Cambodia online but we’re not ornithologists and still haven’t gotten to go on one of Cambodia’s fantastic bird watching tours because of COVID-19. According to Wikipedia, Wreathed Hornbills are a vulnerable species that live in tropical evergreen forests at mid-high level elevations but apparently come to the lowlands to breed. They are found from Northeast India and Bhutan through mainland Southeast Asia to Indonesia.

The birds were huge – larger than Catherine – and there were six of them. They weren’t skittish and didn’t seem to pay us much attention at all, but took off once our dog finally realized what we were looking at and started barking.