The World Narrowed to a Slit: Of Hornbills and Love

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Words by Alexandra Bichara

Alexandra visited us through Tulisan Nusantara, our writers’ residency program. Each year, published writers from across the region are invited to spend time on the island, drawing inspiration from the natural world and the stories of the Riau Islands.​ During their stay, residents explore ideas connected to place, identity, and culture. Guests may spot them working in quiet corners of the island or join open readings and informal discussions when held. Each residency leaves behind a piece of writing, which will be gathered into an anthology over time.

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Photo Credit: Pamela Ng

There was a knocking on my window when there shouldn’t have been.

On a remote island in the middle of the Riau Archipelago, mornings usually arrived without interruption. There were no vagrants wandering the streets begging for alms, no vendors loudly hawking their snacks, no choirs offering to sing Christmas carols when the season had already passed. The island was small enough that familiarity settled quickly—much sooner than I would have expected for a month-long writing residency that had seemingly fallen into my lap. For four weeks, I was to be immersed in nature, surrounded by resort guests and staff who, unlike me, were habitually attuned to the conditions of coastal living far from the madding crowd.

By the time I went to sleep the night before the knocking, I had learned the cadence of this second home: the swash of waves rising and ebbing; the chittering of cicadas and screeching of fruit bats taking over once the lights went out; the faint but persistent creak of bamboo as the winds shifted.

Light was beginning to seep through the floor-length windows of my villa when I heard it. At first, the sound was soft and irregular, like a branch brushing glass. Then it came again, sharper, more intentional. I opened my eyes just as a daub of yellow streaked across the windowpane, the colour so sudden it felt almost imagined. Everyone on the island had mentioned it in passing: the hornbills wander outside the windows. They just never seemed to pass by mine.

An oriental pied hornbill stood just beyond the glass, its beak raised, its body close enough that I could make out the curve of its casque, the horn-like ridge rising above its bill. Three others clustered nearby, their black feathers interrupted by sudden bands of white. The glass separated me from all the nature I admired yet kept at a careful distance in the city. As I sat up, the hornbills froze and, for a brief moment, none of us moved. I had interrupted a private moment, a gathering I had not been invited to. I shifted ever so quietly in bed and, in an instant, they disappeared into the trees.

When one is accustomed to zoos, aquariums, and fantastical worlds where only pterodactyls have such magnificent wingspans, it feels almost improper to witness oriental pied hornbills free and in flight, as though something usually hidden has revealed itself by mistake.

This early-morning encounter pulled me back to my uncle’s garden in the Philippines, where a pair of kalaw—Philippine hornbills—lived tethered to trees right outside the dining room, as though they were camouflaged by the rhythms of domestic life. After a meal at my uncle’s house, their presence began to feel natural, like a rug that had been hung out to dry.

As I lay back down in bed on that island in Indonesia, the oriental pied hornbill and the kalaw hovered in my thoughts. I asked myself how freedom could be so startling as a knock on glass.

To speak of the hornbill is to recognize romance. Many other birds are known to be monogamous: swans, geeks, ducks, cranes. When bird lovers describe this monogamy, conversation often drifts toward love, toward a loyalty built into nature by forces larger than ourselves. If the bond between hornbills can be called love, it is one that operates as a matter of life and death.

When it is time to breed, the female hornbill enters a cavity in a tree and seals herself inside using mud, fruit pulp, and her own droppings. She closes the opening until only a narrow slit remains. From inside the darkness, she incubates the eggs and later tends to the chicks. Outside, the male becomes the sole provider, hunting, foraging, and returning again and again to the tree, delivering food through the slit. The family survives only as long as he does. In areas where hornbills are a common sight, this family dynamic is widely understood. Locals often warn—and are warned—that the death of one hornbill can lead to the death of several. If the male, the provider, is trapped or shot, the female and chicks sealed inside the slit of a tree will starve.

Only five countries harbour endemic hornbill species: Tanzania, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Philippines. But hornbills have become increasingly difficult to spot in Philippine cities and across much of Indonesia’s mainland. Forest conversion, logging, and hunting have narrowed the spaces where such lives are possible. What remains are scattered: birds either held close to homes or encountered briefly in places that still resemble refuge.

When I first stepped into my uncle’s house in Albay province, I did not think to look out the windows. I noticed the antique paintings lining the walls, the expensive china in the aparador, and two very young Shih Tzu puppies begging to be carried by their new family. It was only when I felt watched that I turned toward the dining room window and met the eye of one of the two hornbills tied to the trees just outside. Their brown and black feathers blended into the tree bark, and their chili-red casques resembled fruits hanging from branches. If their eyes hadn’t followed me as I approached the window, I would’ve thought they were made from plastic.

As I stared, my uncle walked toward me.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Kalaw. They’re endangered,” he said. The pride in his voice was unmistakable, like an achievement only few have the pleasure to claim.

“Then what are they doing here?”

“We give them a good life. When there’s a typhoon, we untie them and let them go, but they always come back,” he said, turning to look at me. “Always.”

“So you must treat them well,” I said. “What do you feed them?”

“Minsan hotdog.”

I laughed, waiting for the punchline. My uncle’s face stayed straight.

“They eat anything,” he said.

The kalaw were not introduced as pets and did not have names, but neither did they seem to ask for attention or special care. They were spoken of the way one might speak of fruit trees, heirloom furniture, or antiques kept in a baul—things to be kept only to be shown.

The conversation ended as quickly as it had begun; no one had anything else to say about my cousins’ constant meal companions on the other side of the glass. Dinner had arrived, and it was time to talk about less complicated topics: the food on our plates, the weather during the day, whether one aunt was still in love with a former flame. As I glanced back at the kalaw, I wondered if they were mates, if one had chosen to stay wherever the other was kept, if they even had a sturdy tree where a slit could be sealed and a family formed, or if this truly was just a life shaped by return rather than choice.

The day the oriental pied hornbills visited my window, I spent the rest of my time hyperaware of their movements. They travelled in pairs, flying from tree to tree. Watching them, it was easy to forget how much this devotion depends on conditions shaped by human hands.

In the Philippines, love unfolds within similarly fixed frames. There is no same-sex marriage—Thailand remains the first and only country in Southeast Asia to legalise it. There is also no divorce. The Philippines is one of only two places in the world—the other being the Vatican—where it remains prohibited. That the Vatican, the seat of the Catholic Church and a state composed largely of celibate clergy, would take an uncompromising stance on divorce is unsurprising. That the Philippines, a nation where marriage shapes daily life and survival, has inherited and maintained this position carries different consequences.

Marriage, under these conditions, is the permanent tether keeping unhappy or abused spouses from flying free. Under duress, there are alternatives: annulment, which can take years and is available only to those who can afford it; and legal separation, which does little more than allow spouses to live apart and divide property. To enter a marriage in the Philippines is to accept endurance as a measure of commitment; love is expected to hold, even when the conditions that once sustained it no longer do.

I saw this state-imposed monogamy, a structure everyone seems able to recognize and yet unable to dismantle, in my own home, where my mother raised me on her own for two decades. I saw it in my friends’ homes, where fathers slept on sofas in garages, avoiding their wives making dinner in the kitchen and, in some cases, neglecting their children as well. I saw it in the scar on one lola’s arm, left by a bullet shot by her husband as she tried to run away.

Like the kalaw tied outside my uncle’s dining room, many of the married women I’ve known and loved have blended into the domestic landscape. Their labor has kept households running while their silence has been framed as devotion. What goes unnamed is the rope tying them in place, the tether forcing them under control and bound to obligation. Even without it, there would still be the issue of the nest. When a woman marries, she seals herself into a slit of her own making. Leaving becomes virtually impossible.

In Muslim-dominated Indonesia, on the other hand, divorce has been legal since the enactment of the 1974 Marriage Law. Divorce exists, is practiced, and is incredibly common, with hundreds of thousands of divorce cases filed every year. In 2019, I married my husband, whose mother is Indonesian and father is Filipino. Together, my parents-in-law have lived in Jakarta for over 40 years. To witness their dynamic—making decisions on equal terms, caring for each other through complicated travels and yoga poses, and kissing every time a priest says “Let us offer each other a sign of peace” during mass—is to be reminded that love need not loosen its bonds to allow freedom.

Like hornbills, humans build lives around the bonds they are given, the environments in which they are allowed to thrive. Perhaps what endures is shaped as much by habitat as by attachment.

Each morning after my encounter with the four hornbills, I’d check my watch for the time and sit up as slowly as possible in case they were having yet another meeting outside my window. For a long while, I would wake up alone. Occasionally, other visitors on the island would come to me with tales of the hornbills outside their own windows, recounting their sightings as the most natural yet magical thing in the world.

To feel humbled by a bird like the hornbill is built into the cultures of many indigenous communities in Indonesia. Among the Dayak peoples of Kalimantan, hornbills are regarded as sacred heroes, gods, and guardians of life. They are known as the Panglima Burung, the “Bird Commander,” or the “King of the Worldly Birds,” figures that appear in traditional carvings, textiles, and ceremonies of importance. In some accounts, when a female hornbill dies, her mate continues searching for her for months afterward, embodying the loyalty woven into the bird’s mythology. Even without reference to death, hornbills serve as models of family life: lifelong partnership, shared labor, and unwavering care for offspring.

The hornbill in Indonesia has also become an emblem of place. The helmeted hornbill represents West Kalimantan; the knobbed hornbill stands for South Sulawesi. To forget the hornbill, one could argue, is to forget tradition itself, to allow indigenous knowledge to be edged aside.

Indigenous communities in the Philippines have their own beliefs about hornbills. The Mandaya, Bagobo, and Manobo groups in Mindanao view hornbills as omens or harbingers of spiritual messages, either through sound or flight patterns. To those who grew up in farming communities, kalaw acted as orasan or reloj del monte: time-tellers and mountain clocks, calling out at different times of the day, reminding locals to wake up, eat, rest, and return home.

Still, the most pervasive belief surrounding hornbills in the Philippines is their love and loyalty. Now that hornbills, known as “farmers of the rainforest,” are rarely found in the cities, where trees are few and far between, this love and loyalty is no longer seen. It travels only by word of mouth, spread only to those who care to listen.

Across the Philippines and Indonesia, hornbills face pressures that reverence alone cannot withstand. Forest conversion for agriculture and development—so named from a human point of view, promising progress while undoing conditions of life for others—has steadily erased the old-growth trees hornbills rely on for nesting. Logging removes both canopy and the deep cavities where hornbill families are sealed into existence. Without these trees, the love and loyalty hornbills have become known for have nowhere to take root.

Hunting and trapping compound this loss. Hornbills are taken for food, for sport, and for the illegal pet trade. While I can’t imagine my relatives putting on the gear and making the effort to seek out kalaw and their nests, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had found their two endangered residents on Facebook Marketplace. Nest poaching interrupts breeding cycles entirely, severing families before they are ever seen. Because hornbill life depends so fully on pair bonds and continuity, the removal of one bird can unravel an entire ecosystem.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List currently categorizes the oriental pied hornbill as of Least Concern. Its presence still feels possible, even ordinary, in places where forests remain intact.

The kalaw tells a different story. As the largest hornbill in the Philippines and one endemic to Luzon, it carries the weight of shrinking habitat more visibly. Of the eleven hornbill species found in the Philippines, nine are listed as threatened by the IUCN and classified as endangered under the Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ National List of Threatened Philippine Fauna. It isn’t difficult to identify the link between the country’s endangered hornbills and centuries of colonial extraction, followed by postwar logging concessions, agribusiness expansion, and dense population pressure, which have left little room for the old-growth forests that hornbills require. Protection arrives late, is unevenly enforced, and often after the conditions for nesting have already disappeared.

Philippine families are often praised for endurance, for staying together against all odds. Yet they are also asked to survive within structures that offer little flexibility and few exits. Loyalty is celebrated; leaving is suspect. Like the kalaw, many families are expected to persist even as the spaces that once sustained them shrink or become tainted.

As I spoke with more and more guests about their encounters with the oriental pied hornbills on the island, I also wondered what locals knew or felt about the King of the Worldly Birds.

“They’re loyal.”

“They mate for life.”

“They’re social creatures. Always together, but sometimes there’s a loner.”

“Eternal love. I want a love like that.”

In both the Philippines and Indonesia, love and family life remain deeply shaped by religious and traditional values that, in turn, shape these languages of devotion. In the Philippines, Catholic doctrine continues to inform laws and social expectations surrounding marriage. In Indonesia, Islam and other customary practices that vary by region frame ideals of the same. These belief systems do not operate uniformly, but they do set the terms through which love is often understood.

Conservation efforts for hornbills emerge from similar impulses. In the Philippines, Republic Act No. 9147, the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act, formally recognizes hornbills as a protected species. In Indonesia, initiatives such as the National Partnership for Indonesian Hornbill Conservation aim to safeguard habitats and reduce hunting through collaboration with local communities. On paper, these policies signal progress, yet the intent to conserve and the practice of conservation do not always align neatly.

Laws meant to protect can also restrict, and values meant to preserve can resist change. Just as marriage laws in the Philippines emphasize staying over leaving, policies such as fortress conservation tend to focus on control rather than coexistence. Both love and wildlife are asked to endure without being given what they need to survive. Hornbills are celebrated as symbols of loyalty, yet their forests are cleared. Families are praised for staying together, even as the structures that support care erode. In both cases, devotion is demanded while habitat shrinks.

In Indonesia, or at least on the paradisiacal speck of the Riau Archipelago I was on, I saw glimpses of another possibility: of hornbills treated as neighbors instead of pets or smuggled objects. The oriental pied hornbills that hopped from tree to tree, window to window, continued to stay on the island, and their staying mattered because leaving was—or seemed—possible.

My experience in my home country, from my father’s faraway province to the cities I live and work in within Metro Manila, has felt more uneven. While wildlife like kalaw are spoken of with pride and welfare organizations work to spread practices of preservation and conservation, news of kalaw smuggled and dying in luggage persists. These great hornbills of red, yellow and black are subject to environments—be they suffocating suitcases or gardens paved with concrete—that are leading to their extinction.

It has become clear to me that conservation mainly involves allowing a species to thrive, protecting the space in which it can choose to remain. The same might be said of love.

It is tempting to compare hornbills and love too neatly, to draw clean lines between biology and belief, between forests and families. But both resist that kind of resolution.

On my last morning on the island, I folded my clothes and tucked them into my only piece of luggage. I had never fully unpacked, choosing instead to pull things from the suitcase as needed, since one month had not seemed long enough to settle in completely. I picked up my phone and sent my flight details to my husband, a man I hadn’t seen for weeks and yet would meet me at the airport in Manila as if no time had passed. Then I gave one last glance out the window and saw a hornbill alone.

It perched on a bare branch just beyond my bedroom balcony, its body still, its call absent.

This was the loner, the hornbill with no one by its side and no one visibly waiting.

For a moment, I wondered if it was truly solitary or simply between returns. It could have been a bird who had lost its mate, one who had yet to find a lover, or one sent ahead to search for food—a provider moving through a world that might not be as kind as it should be.

As I zipped my bag and prepared to be met by the man I had vowed to love for a lifetime, I found myself held by the image of this hornbill—the loner that resisted the stories I had been taught to expect—until it lifted off, disappearing behind the crown of a nearby tamarind tree.