The Great Hornbill Chase : There Was This Huge Bird of Borneo in His Palm Tree

“I felt pretty silly for not noticing it earlier,” said Dave Bennett of Sunland. “A big, huge bird from Borneo with an enormous orange beak, sitting on the palm tree in my front yard.”

“You don’t see that every day,” agreed his housemate, Bob Ettleman.

Bennett and Ettleman witnessed the last act of The Great Hornbill Chase, which disturbed the peace of hot-tubbers and other residents of Riderwood Drive on Sunday night.

Two keepers from the Los Angeles Zoo ran to ground the male of a pair of rare Asian rhinoceros hornbills, worth $7,500 each, that escaped from the zoo a week earlier. The bird got revenge by biting one of his captors, who was not seriously injured.

The search was still on for the female.

The birds are about three feet long, black with white trimmings and with large orange bills topped by an orange growth.

They escaped Jan. 28 when a eucalyptus tree fell and punched a hole in their aviary but hung around the zoo in Griffith Park the rest of the week. Zoo spokeswoman Lora La Marca said residents near the Big Tujunga Wash, about 10 miles away, telephoned Sunday afternoon that one of the birds had roosted in a tree there.

About 8 p.m., animal keepers Mike Dee and Bill Foster went in pursuit with nets. To tire the bird, “they just kept spooking him from tree to tree,” La Marca said, by clapping their hands, throwing things and shaking any tree in which he landed. The keepers and volunteers, she said, went “running though people’s backyards. There were people in hot tubs, people yelling at them to keep quiet.”

By the time the bird reached his tree, Bennett said, “he looked real tired. He just kind of flapped, real slowly, into a tree in the wash,” a wide, dry riverbed. The zookeepers “went over the wall in our backyard with ropes and rappelled down the side of the wash after him,” he said.

“I knocked it out of the tree and Bill pounced on it with the net,” Dee said. “The bird bit Bill, snapped onto his finger, and I had to pry the bill open. He didn’t like being caught. He squawked all the way back to Foothill Boulevard, where we put him in a crate.”

A zoo veterinarian pronounced the bird fit. He was returned to his cage, where he greedily gobbled grapes.