The flight of the hornbill: drift and diffusion in arboreal avian movement

Capturing movement of animals in mathematical models has long been a keenly pursued direction of r­esearch . Any good model of animal movement is built upon information about the animal’s environment and the available resources including whether prey is in abundance or scarce, densely distributed or ­sparse . Such an approach could enable the identification of certain quantities or measures from the model that are species-specific characteristics. We propose here a mechanistic model to describe the movement of two species of Asian hornbills in a resource-abundant heterogenous landscape which includes degraded forests and human settlements. Hornbill telemetry data was used to this end.