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Together with her team, Pilai Poonswad has carried
out groundbreaking research on the hornbill, a
bird whose wingspan can reach 1.9 metres.

Confronting the hostile and suspicious villagers, Pilai Poonswad was characteristically blunt: “Your children will dig up your bones and curse them for what you have done to the forests,” she told them. There was a tense heartbeat of silence as the assistant headman arose. “That is true,” he said. “There are times when I’d like to curse my own parents for what they have done to the forest.”

With these few, potent words spoken in February 1994, men who had been plundering the fast-vanishing rainforest of southern Thailand of its birdlife and rich natural resources began their metamorphosis into gamekeepers, forest wardens and ecotourism guides – and a model of social economy in which modern humans live in harmony with ancient forests was born.

Behind the miracle is a great, beautiful and regal bird, with a wingspan of 1.9 metres. Feathered in striking black, white, russet, crimson and gold and crowned with magnificent casques on their beaks, hornbills are the quintessence of all that is rare, vital and mysterious in tropical forests from Africa to Asia. Their life is interwoven with the woodland which they help to regenerate by spreading seeds. When forests are fragmented, the hornbills too are lost. Thailand has 13 of Asia’s 31 species of hornbill; one may be almost extinct, five are endangered, four are threatened and three vulnerable. A third of the forest in which hornbills dwell has fallen.

It was this combination of the hornbill’s natural beauty and fragility that drew Pilai into the Thai forests to find a solution that won international acclaim when she became a 2006 Laureate of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

Pilai vividly recalls her first encounter with a hornbill in 1967 in Khao Yai National Park. She suddenly heard a terrifying, rushing sound above her: “It was like a locomotive. I was quite scared. I thought it was a wild animal. I started to run like crazy.” The powerful beat of the hornbill’s wings – accentuated by its lack of underwing feathers – can be heard a kilometre away. Pilai mistook it for the snorting of an angry gaur (wild ox). Some time later she was asked by her teacher and mentor, famed American ornithologist Dr Elliott McClure, to guide a BBC documentary team who wanted to film hornbills, also at Khao Yai.

The search for the birds was frustrating: the jungle was hot and wet; Pilai slept fitfully in a sleeping bag on the forest floor, was bitten by insects, ate clams she found in a forest stream – and the hornbills stubbornly refused to appear. Then a ranger reported an active nest. Pilai headed out to it: arriving at first light, she heard the female, hidden inside the hollow of a tree, knocking. Fascinated, she watched the male great hornbill feed his imprisoned mate on forest fruits, through a tiny gap in the sealed tree trunk.

The unique and intriguing breeding habits that caught her attention are central to the birds’ plight. Each hornbill pair seeks out a suitable hollow – 15 to 40 metres above the ground in the trunk or branch of a Neobalanocarpus, Dipterocarpus or Syzygium tree – in which to raise a single chick. When a suitable cavity is found, the female walls herself in, using mud supplied by her mate and regurgitated food, to hatch and rear her chick. The male feeds them for the next three months and, if he fails, both mother and chick may perish. The birds consume up to 80 different kinds of fruit, scattering the seeds over many hectares of forest. With other seed-distributing animals such as monkeys now scarce, the hornbill has become pivotal in maintaining the integrity of the forest. But the birds rarely spread the seeds of the trees in which they nest: if these disappear, the hornbills too will vanish – and the trees and plants they help propagate will soon follow.

Today the charismatic, unstoppable professor of biology is acknowledged as the world authority on Asian hornbills, has published prolifically on them and convened several international conferences. In 1994 she established the Hornbill Research Foundation to raise funds for their study and protection. Among conservationists she is honoured as the “Great Mother of the Hornbills”. Says former Thai Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun: “I greatly admire her perspectives in working for conservation in the long-term and for ecology in general.” Dr Timothy Laman, a Harvard University ornithologist, states simply: “I have never met an individual who has had so much impact on conservation in their country.”

The challenges Pilai Poonswad took on to study and save hornbills were never easy, nor safe: “At each research site, I encountered various hazards from being chased by elephants, coming face-to-face with tigers, meeting king cobras and Asiatic black bears, to infestation with ticks and leeches. Though there are no fierce large animals where my current project is located, at Budo-Sungai Padi [two mountains on the slim Thai peninsula close to the Malaysian border], there are terrorists, poachers and illegal loggers that I have to deal with.” Added to this is the cauldron of unrest in southern Thailand, into which Pilai, a Buddhist woman and urban academic, was introducing challenging ideas and proposing a new way of life for impoverished Muslim villagers.

She first visited Budo-Sungai Padi in 1994 in search of traces of the rhinoceros hornbill, with its extraordinary sunset-hued casque, which was believed to be extinct there. The mountains were shrinking islands of intact rainforest amid a sea of developed land, gazetted to become a national park. Here she met Asae Masae, an unashamed and highly professional poacher of hornbills. “The people are so very poor,” Pilai says of her conversations with him and other villagers. “They have almost no income, except what they can make as plantation workers, which is very little. Poaching two hornbill chicks of the rarer species can bring them the equivalent of a year’s pay. It was part of the way they survive.”

She visited each villager in turn, explaining her plan to pay them to help her locate hornbill nests, watch over them and collect data. She outlined the economic benefits of ecotourism. She confronted them with the consequences for their children of plundering the forests. Her passion and directness won their hearts, and Masae, with his brilliant forest skills, became her closest assistant – a true poacher-turned-gamekeeper. Success was crowned by finding the rhinoceros hornbill on Mt. Budo. By 2006, 41 people from nine villages were watching over 176 nests belonging to six hornbill species.

The hornbill programme is taking place against a violent background: the threat of terrorism from agitators hiding in the villages and forest, and the government’s counter-action. Yet, she says, the villagers are mounting a huge effort to keep the project running. When the 1997 Thai economic slump cut the slender funding that was paying them, Pilai’s ingenious solution was to inspire wealthy Thai city families to “adopt” a hornbill family. They paid US$120 a year for protection of the nest by villagers, in return receiving regular reports and pictures of “their” birds. Campaigning tirelessly through the media, concerts and art exhibitions, she has raised funds to protect more than 100 nests for 10 years and continue hornbill research. The impoverished villagers responded with breathtaking generosity, donating scarce land for an education centre to spread word of the birds and the plan to save them.

The project to which Pilai is devoting her Rolex Award funds is visionary: to create a secure supply of hornbill nests, teams of villagers maintain and repair existing nesting sites and construct artificial ones from weathered timber, fiberglass and resin. To her delight, a pair of hornbills has already used one of the nesting boxes. The villagers mark, measure and sample the trees that support hornbills. A nursery to produce tree seedlings has been established, and the ugly scars of illegal logging in the forest will be sown over and healed. Men, women and children from the villages work side-by-side at the task.

A mobile learning centre and trained educators is spreading word of the project to other villages and communities in the south of Thailand, while ex-poachers teach current poachers that a safer future for them and their families lies in regeneration rather than destruction and extermination. And researchers continue to document key relationships in the rainforest between plants, birds and animals. Pilai’s dream is that these initiatives will foster more research into the complex web of life and modern Thais will learn anew what it means to live in harmony with the forest.

Pilai Poonswad herself compares the future for her project with the hornbill tending his mate: bringing humanity to a closer nurturing of the natural world on which we all, ultimately, depend.

Julian Cribb is adjunct professor of science communication at the University of Technology, Sydney and edits R&D Review and ScienceAlert.