Can Toucans Fly? Flight With a Giant Beak Explained

How do toucans fly?

Toucans fly with a distinctive rhythm: a burst of rapid, heavy wingbeats is followed by a short glide with the wings held out, during which the bird slowly loses height. Then it flaps again. Seen from the side, the flight path rises and falls like a roller coaster, a style called undulating flight that is also typical of woodpeckers, their relatives in the order Piciformes.

Most flights are short. A toucan typically drops from a perch, flaps across a gap in the canopy and lands in the next tree, where it continues by hopping. Groups often travel this way in a loose single file, one bird following another across a clearing.

Takeoff is quick and fairly noisy, with whirring wings. Landing is often clumsy-looking: the bird swings up into the branches and grabs hold with its strong feet.

Why toucans are short-distance fliers

The shape of a bird’s wings tells a lot about how it flies. Toucans have short, broad, rounded wings and a fairly long tail. This design gives fast lift and good control in cluttered forest, but it is tiring over long distances. Long-distance fliers such as swallows, terns and albatrosses have long, narrow, pointed wings instead.

Toucans also have little reason to fly far. Their food, mostly fruit, grows in the canopy, and a good fruiting tree can feed a group for hours. It is usually easier to bound through branches than to take off again and again.

Their feet are adapted for perching and climbing. Like woodpeckers and parrots, toucans have zygodactyl feet, with two toes pointing forward and two pointing back. This gives a firm, pincer-like grip on branches and helps them move in a series of quick hops.

Does the big beak make flying hard?

It might seem that a bill nearly as long as the body would make a toucan nose-heavy. In fact the bill is surprisingly light. It has a thin outer layer of keratin, the protein found in fingernails, over a core of spongy bone full of air spaces, with a structure that engineers have studied as a model for strong, lightweight materials.

Because of this, the bill adds length but not much weight. The toucan’s center of gravity stays close to its wings, and the bird remains balanced in the air. The bill also has other jobs, including reaching fruit and shedding body heat, as explained in why do toucans have big beaks?.

The toco toucan: the strongest flier

The toco toucan is the largest toucan and lives in more open country than its relatives, including savanna woodland, river forests and wetlands in central South America. Moving between scattered patches of trees means it often has to cross open ground, and it does so more readily than forest toucans.

Field observers have recorded toco toucans flying across rivers and lakes more than 5 km (3 miles) wide. Most toucan species, which live inside continuous rainforest, seldom cross large open areas or broad rivers at all. After the breeding season toco toucans may also form larger flocks that wander widely in search of fruit.

How toucans move day to day

A typical day for a toucan involves a lot of short movements. A pair or small group visits a series of fruiting trees, hopping around inside each tree to reach fruit and making brief flights between them. Toucans also hop down to lower branches, and some species occasionally drop to the ground for fallen fruit.

Toucans use large home ranges for their size. Studies of toco toucans have found average home ranges of around 86 hectares (210 acres), and they shift between areas as trees come into fruit. Because they swallow fruit whole and fly off before passing the seeds, these daily movements make toucans important seed dispersers, as described in what do toucans eat?.

Toucans compared with other birds

Toucans are not the only birds that rarely fly far. Many forest birds, including turacos in Africa and hornbills in Asia and Africa, have similar habits of short flights and lots of hopping. Hornbills, which also have huge bills, are an example of a similar lifestyle evolving in an unrelated group of birds.

At the other extreme are birds that cannot fly at all. Ostriches, emus and kiwis have lost the power of flight completely, as explained in can ostriches fly?. Toucans are nowhere near that point: they are fully capable fliers, simply specialists in short trips.

Common myths about toucan flight

Myth: toucans cannot fly because of their beaks. This is false. All toucan species can fly. Their bills are light and do not prevent flight.

Myth: toucans fly long distances across the rainforest. Most toucans actually stay within a home range and fly only short distances at a time. Long flights, like the water crossings of the toco toucan, are the exception rather than the rule.

Fact: toucans are better hoppers than fliers. Watching a toucan in the wild, you will usually see it bounding through branches with both feet together far more often than flying.