Air Date: Week of May 16, 2025

There are over forty species of toucan. Shown here is a Cuvier’s toucan. (Photo: Pablo BM, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

In the Peruvian Amazon not far from where Pope Leo XIV lived for many years, you can find a most distinctive bird with a comically huge bill. BirdNote’s Mary McCann reports on the toucan, a tropical icon.

Transcript

CURWOOD: In the Peruvian Amazon not far from where Pope Leo XIV lived for many years, you can find a most distinctive bird with a comically huge bill.
BirdNote’s Mary McCann has more.

https://www.birdnote.org/podcasts/birdnote-daily/toucan-tropical-icon

BirdNote®

Toucan - Tropical Icon

Written by Adam Sedgley

[Amazon rainforest sounds, replete with bird life]
MCCANN: In the Amazon, heat and humidity virtually smother you. Although a cacophony of birdcalls surrounds you, it’s hard to see even a single bird. Then one call, emanating from a cathedral of vegetation, catches your ear.
[Call of Cuvier’s Toucan]
Could this piercing and cheerful yelp be the same sound you remember from a Saturday morning in your childhood? It’s the call of a toucan, the tropical icon and inspiration for Toucan Sam, that colorful “spokesbird” for Froot Loops® cereal.
Characterized by massive yet surprisingly light bills, the 41 species in the toucan family are found only in Central and South America.
The species we are hearing now is a Cuvier’s Toucan [call of Cuvier’s Toucan].
It has a jet-black body and a spotless white bib. Its black bill, nearly as long as its body, is rimmed with vivid yellow and baby blue. That the toucan hops through the trees as it forages for fruit adds to its comical demeanor. But don’t expect this bird to lead you to a bounty of rainbow-colored sugar puffs with its nose. Toucans can’t smell.
[Call of Cuvier’s Toucan]
So why does Toucan Sam – or any other toucan – have such a large bill? Turns out that they can conserve heat – or release it – with those giant beaks. I’m Mary McCann.
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Sounds of the Amazon rainforest and Cuvier’s Toucan provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recordists are not known.
Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

© 2013 Tune In to Nature.org December 2016/November 2024 Narrator: Mary McCann

ID#010506CUTOKPLU CUTO-01b

CURWOOD: For pictures, flap on over to the Living on Earth website, loe dot org.  

 

Links

Learn more about the toucan on the BirdNote® website