Rhinos, cheetahs and wild dogs get the lion’s share of news headlines when animal conservation is discussed, but there is another animal that is facing extinction in Africa that does not make the headlines. The Southern Ground Hornbill, which without conservation intervention could be extinct within the next 50 years.

So when Imperial Truck Rental was alerted to the bird’s plight by the Mabula Ground Hornbill Project (a registered non-profit organisation working to ensure the bird’s survival), the company did not hesitate in donating a vehicle to the project for use during its busiest time of the year.

Lucy Kemp, project manager for the Mabula Ground Hornbill Project, says: “This donation allows our teams to cover the necessary areas to facilitate the annual nest checking to ensure that we know what is happening in terms of breeding success. It also enabled us to safely transport chicks to suitable monitored nests. Our other vehicles are old and this is the first time we have felt safe while travelling to remote areas, often at night.”

Johnny Wright, MD at Imperial Truck Rental, adds: “We will continue with our association with this project and are delighted to be assisting a worthwhile initiative, as these are very special birds.”

•  One the main functions of the Mabula Ground hornbill project is to harvest (together with partners Endangered Wildlife Trust and the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology) and transport “doomed second chicks” from the nests of Southern Ground Hornbills around the country (Mpumalanga, Limpopo and now expanding to KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape). According to the long-term data collection in the Kruger National Park, one of the factors contributing to the Southern Ground Hornbill’s situation is that it breeds very slowly, with the bird first breeding at around eight years of age, and thereafter, it successfully raises just one chick every nine years. Two eggs are laid at each breeding attempt and the parents can only care for one, abandoning the other. The second chick acts as a natural insurance policy to ensure that all the energy put into breeding amounts to something. It is this second redundant chick that is the basis of the project’s conservations efforts. Kemp says:“We take them from wild nests to specialised hand-rearing facilities and they are later reintroduced back into the wild. This reintroduction effort aims to restock areas where the birds have become locally extinct (60% of their natural range), to halt the decline in their numbers, and slowly work towards rebuilding the population to sustainable levels.”Living almost as long as humans, the Southern Ground Hornbill plays an important role in pest control in Africa as it eats small animals – from termites and rodents to snakes. It is the largest bird in the world to breed in cooperative groups of between three and 12. Only one pair breeds and the rest help them to raise the chick. Less than 500 groups remain in South Africa – half of them safe within the boundaries of the greater Kruger National Park. The birds are also vulnerable to accidental poisoning by farmers and are sometimes directly persecuted because their territorial behaviour leads them to fight the ‘enemy’ in their reflections in windows and this results in many broken windows. To counter this, the Mabula Hornbill Project has education and awareness campaigns aimed at schools and farmers’ associations in areas where the birds occur and where they are being reintroduced.