What do shoebills eat? Their favorite lungfish, how they eat and how much

What do shoebills eat?

What shoebills eat is mostly fish. They often eat lungfish and catfish, and they also eat frogs and snakes.

Many of the big birds that live near water feed mainly on fish, and the shoebill is one of them. The Animal Diversity Web of the University of Michigan lists these five as its main prey.

There are also records of shoebills eating frogs, monitor lizards, turtles, baby crocodiles, mollusks and carrion (the bodies of dead animals). The Dallas World Aquarium in the US says they sometimes eat rats and small birds too.

The animal encyclopedia of Ueno Zoo in Japan also says their food is fish such as lungfish and catfish, plus amphibians (frogs and their relatives).

What is the shoebill's favorite food?

The favorite food is said to be lungfish. A paper reporting observations in Zambia in 2016 also sums up that shoebills prefer lungfish.

The lungfish whose name comes up most often is the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus). It lives in the lakes and swamps of East Africa and in the basins of the Nile and Congo rivers.

A lungfish has lungs as well as gills, and it puts its mouth out of the water to gulp air. So there are moments when it has to come up to the surface. For a shoebill that hunts by ambush, it is an easy fish to aim at.

The marbled lungfish can grow big: there is a record of one 2 m long and 17 kg (FishBase). Of course, shoebills do not catch only giants like that.

In the dry season, African lungfish bury themselves in mud and pass the time as if asleep. A 2010 report from ZooTampa says that some researchers think the big bill may be used to dig up lungfish sleeping in the mud.

How the lungfish body works, and the dry-season sleep in the mud called estivation, are covered in The shoebill's favorite food: what is a lungfish?.

Does what shoebills eat differ by country or wetland?

Yes. Even among shoebills, the fish they eat most often changes with the wetland they live in.

The genus Clarias, which was common in Zambia, is a group also called walking catfish. According to FishBase, a fish database, a typical species, Clarias gariepinus, has an extra organ for breathing air.

This fish likes shallow, muddy wetlands. A length of up to 170 cm has been recorded.

How much does a shoebill eat in a day?

We could not find a study that measured how much a shoebill eats in a day (in grams) within our search. What is known is how often they catch prey.

There is a study that observed wild shoebills for a total of 170.1 hours in the Bangweulu Wetlands of Zambia (published in 2015).

• They thrust their bill in about once every 2.2 hours on average
• They caught prey about once every 8.3 hours on average
• Outside the breeding season, 16 of 70 strikes succeeded

At one fish every 8.3 hours, even a bird hunting from morning to evening catches only one or two. By human standards, that looks like very little food.

Let us compare it with another big waterbird. The great white pelican is estimated to take 1.45 to 2.25 kg of food a day (Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan). Pelicans drive fish together as a group and scoop up many of them.

How do shoebills eat their food?

A shoebill swallows its prey whole. In many cases it drops the prey's head before swallowing.

The shoebill's hunting is an ambush. It stands still in shallow water, and when prey comes close, it thrusts its head and neck into the water all at once. The full sequence is in Shoebill hunting: waiting, lunging and success rate.

The Animal Diversity Web of the University of Michigan describes how it eats after the catch as follows.

1. It grabs a mouthful of water plants along with the prey
2. Holding the prey, it shakes its head from side to side to drop only the plants
3. In many cases it drops the prey's head before swallowing

In a study of the Malagarasi wetland in Tanzania (2019), the time to finish eating prey was about 6.9 minutes on average. It takes that long to swallow a big fish whole.

The Ueno Zoo animal encyclopedia also says the bird catches a fish quickly and swallows it whole. How the edges of the bill hold a fish is covered in What is special about the shoebill's beak?.

Do other birds steal what shoebills eat?

Sometimes they do. In Tanzania, African fish eagles stole shoebills' prey.

In the same 2019 study, every one of the eagles' 138 theft attempts succeeded. The thefts happened more often in the dry season, when the water is low. The shoebills were reported not to fight back.

The researchers raise the possibility that the long time shoebills take to finish eating works in the eagles' favor. For more, see Shoebill hunting: waiting, lunging and success rate.

Where do shoebills look for food?

In wetlands with shallow water and tall grass. In water with little oxygen, fish often come up to the surface to breathe.

According to the Animal Diversity Web of the University of Michigan, the best hunting spots are places with shallow water and tall grass. The grass hides the bird's body. Where the water is deep, the bird stands on sturdy floating plants to hunt.

The Dallas World Aquarium also says shoebills look for food in water with little oxygen. When oxygen is low, fish come up to the surface more often.

In the Zambia study, the number of fish caught also differed by hunting ground.

• Flooded grassland: 0.29 fish per hour
• On floating plants: 0.10 fish per hour

Their home wetlands are covered in Where do shoebills live? and What is a shoebill swamp like?.

What do shoebills eat at zoos?

Zoos feed them mainly fish. Which fish depends on the country and the facility.

We could not find, within our search, any case in which a Japanese zoo officially publishes the kind or amount of its shoebills' daily food.

What do baby shoebills eat?

Chicks eat fish too. The parents carry the prey they catch to the nest and feed it to the chick. In zoo records, the parents fed by regurgitating (bringing the food back up).

In the field study in Zambia, a parent brought prey to the chick on the nest about 1.2 times a day. For about 40 days after the chicks hatched, the parents almost never left the area around the nest.

There are zoo records too. ZooTampa in the US (then called Lowry Park Zoo) was the first facility in North America where a shoebill chick hatched, in December 2009. A 2010 report describes the food in detail.

How chicks grow is in Baby shoebills, and why only one chick often grows up even from two eggs is in Shoebill siblings.

How does the way shoebills get food differ from other waterbirds?

Waiting still is like a heron. The differences are that the shoebill falls forward with its whole body to catch prey, and swallows big fish whole over a long time.

All the numbers and descriptions come from the Animal Diversity Web of the University of Michigan. The grey heron swallows its catch in one go. The shoebill takes about 6.9 minutes on average to finish eating. The great white pelican sometimes flies 60 to 100 km from its nest to feed.

Here is the key point. The shoebill is a bird that waits alone and catches big fish one at a time.

The differences between shoebills and herons and storks are also covered in Is a shoebill a stork? Shoebill vs stork and heron.

How are what shoebills eat and their wetlands connected?

Protecting the wetlands where fish live means protecting what shoebills eat.

Mabamba Swamp in Uganda is known as a place to watch shoebills. According to the stork, ibis and spoonbill specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the swamp also supports local people's livelihoods through fishing, sand extraction, hunting and tourism. Fishers are also listed as one of the causes of disturbance to shoebills.

The shoebills in Uganda are estimated at about 150 pairs. The fish, the shoebills and the local people all share the same wetland.

The reasons for the decline and the work to protect them are in Is the shoebill endangered? and Shoebill conservation efforts.

Sources

• Animal Diversity Web (University of Michigan): Balaeniceps rex
• Animal Diversity Web: Ardea cinerea (grey heron)
• Animal Diversity Web: Ardea goliath (Goliath heron)
• Animal Diversity Web: Pelecanus onocrotalus (great white pelican)
• Animal Diversity Web: Leptoptilos crumeniferus (marabou stork)
• Mullers & Amar: study of foraging behaviour in the Bangweulu Wetlands, Zambia (Ostrich 86, 2015)
• Mullers & Amar: study of parental behavior at the nest and chick growth (Waterbirds 38, 2015)
• Loftie-Eaton: observations of shoebills in the Bangweulu Wetlands (Biodiversity Observations 7.58, 2016) PDF
• John & Lee: study of kleptoparasitism (food stealing) by African fish eagles in western Tanzania (Tanzania Journal of Science 45(2), 2019)
• FishBase: Clarias gariepinus
• FishBase: Protopterus aethiopicus
• Dallas World Aquarium: Shoebill stork
• Ueno Zoo (恩賜上野動物園): Animal encyclopedia, shoebill (in Japanese)
• Killmar: report on the first hatching in North America at ZooTampa (AFA Watchbird 37(3), 2010) PDF
• Pairi Daiza: introduction to the shoebill
• Mandai Bird Paradise: introduction to Zane
• Sacheon Aramar Aquarium: introduction to Bill (in Korean)
• Tokyo Metropolitan Government's GO TOKYO: Ueno Zoo's shoebills (August 2026)
• IUCN SSC Stork, Ibis and Spoonbill Specialist Group: shoebills and livelihoods in Uganda