Striding quietly and deliberately through an African swamp, King Whalehead searches for his next victim.

In the dark pools between clumps of papyrus sedges, he hopes to find a fat fish to snatch up with his massive beak.

The name King Whalehead is a translation of the scientific name of his species,

Balinaceps Rex.

But only his friends call him King Whalehead.

You and I know him better as The Shoe Bill.

This tall, grey bird appears more dinosaur-like than most members of the class avies.

You aren't likely to confuse it with any other bird.

It possesses a unique and impressive combination of size, color, and bill shape.

The shoe bill is a top predator in certain kinds of swamps and wetlands in Africa.

It terrorizes not only large fish but other small aquatic animals like amphibians and reptiles.

The swamps haunted by shoebills were, at least historically, so remote and inaccessible that European naturalists didn't,

quote-unquote, discover this species until the mid-1800s.

The famous English ornithologist John Gould wrote a paper in 1851 describing this bird to

Western science for the first time.

In his paper, Gould assigned the shoebill the scientific name of Balena Seps Rex and said it is,

quote, the most extraordinary bird I have seen for many years, end quote.

That's a bold statement coming from a guy who had seen quite a few

amazing birds, in Australia and beyond. Also, I'm pretty sure I nailed that impressin of John

Gould. You can probably tell I've been practicing a lot. Of course, native Africans, including the Egyptians,

had long been familiar with the shoe bill. In Uganda, this bird is called Bulwe.

Arabs named it Abu Markub, which supposedly means father of the shoe. I tried typing

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