wrong. But then no European explorer travelling through New Guinea had even seen the living birds in the wild. The first to do that was a French traveller, René Primevère Lesson (1794–1849). He was serving on board a corvette, La Coquille, as the ship’s naturalist with the explicit task of collecting zoological specimens. Going ashore in July 1824 at Dorey Harbour, today’s Manokwari, at the western end of New Guinea, he glimpsed one of the birds. ‘Whilst we were walking very carefully on a wild pig trail through the dense scrub,’ he wrote, ‘suddenly in a slight curve a bird of paradise flew gracefully over our heads; trailing light like a meteor. We were so amazed,’ he added, ‘that the flintlocks in our hands did not move.’
Mr Thomson, Animal and Bird Preserver to the Leverian and British Museums. Ramsey Richard Reinagle, c.1800. Oils on canvas, 147 cm × 147 cm (58 in × 58 in). Courtesy of The Yale Centre for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven.
Two watercolours by Jacques Barraband, c.1800.
An immature male Lesser Bird of Paradise. 52 cm × 38 cm (21 in × 15 in).
Greater Bird of Paradise. 52 cm × 38 cm (21 in × 15 in). This painting was used as the basis for an engraved plate, printed in colours and finished by hand in Levaillant’s Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux de Paradis et des Rolliers (1801–06).
Red Bird of Paradise, male, one of the species that Alfred Russel Wallace encountred during his travels in New Guinea and its surrounding islands. This engraving by T. W. Wood was one of a number of pictures produced for the celebrated book that Wallace published on his return to Britain, The Malay Archipelago (1869). A curiosity of this particular species is the structure of the two long central tail feathers. In other birds of the genus these resemble thin wires, but when examined closely those of the Red Bird are more like straps of plastic.
Eventually, however, he did shoot specimens which were brought back to Europe and duly described in his book, the first treatise to be devoted to birds of paradise by someone who had actually seen living specimens. It is illustrated by several rather undistinguished (although charming) plates, drawn by French artists Paul Oudart (1796–c.1860) and Jean-Gabriel Prêtre (fl. 1800–50).
But even Lesson did not see the birds in display. The first European to do that was an Englishman, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). He was a self-educated man of limited means, but with a passion for natural history and a burning ambition to see nature at its most varied and wonderful in the tropics. He planned to pay for his journey there by collecting natural history specimens and selling them to museums and wealthy collectors. His first journey to the Amazon had ended in disaster when, after four years of arduous travel and industrious collecting, he started on the return journey to Britain. Three weeks out to sea, his ship caught fire and he lost thousands of carefully prepared specimens and all his meticulous field notes. He was lucky to escape with his life. When he at last reached Britain, nothing daunted, he made preparations for another expedition. This time, he decided to go to New Guinea, expressly to search for birds of paradise.
Landing in Singapore, he started a series of journeys travelling from island to island in local craft, and living often in conditions of great hardship. Eventually, he reached the Aru Islands that lie south of the western tip of New Guinea and established himself in the trading village of Dobbo. Here men came from all over south-east Asia to obtain bird of paradise skins that were still being prepared in the same way as in Magellan’s time. And eventually, by following the hunters into the forest, Wallace found a tree in which Greater Birds were displaying. This is how he described the scene:
The birds now commenced what people here call their ‘sicaleli’ or dancing parties, in certain trees in the forest… which have an immense head of spreading branches and large but scattered leaves, giving a clear space for the birds to play and exhibit their plumes. On one of these trees a dozen or twenty full-plumaged male birds assemble together, raise up their wings, stretch out their necks, and elevate their exquisite plumes, keeping them in a continual vibration. Between whiles they fly across from branch to branch in great excitement, so that the whole tree is filled with waving plumes in every variety of attitude and motion. At the time of [the bird’s] excitement, the wings are raised vertically over the back, the head is bent down and stretched out, and the long plumes are raised up and expanded till they form two magnificent golden fans, striped with deep red at the base and fading off into the pale brown tint of the finely divided and softly waving points. The whole bird is then overshadowed by them, the crouching body, yellow head and emerald green throat forming but the foundation and setting to the golden glory which waves above. When seen in this attitude, the Bird of Paradise really deserves its name, and must be ranked as one of the most beautiful and wonderful of living things.
This, published in 1869, is the first account of the display of any bird of paradise and it could have been a good guide for anyone who tried to portray the dance of any species in the genus Paradisaea. Four years after it appeared, a wealthy American ornithologist, Daniel Giraud Elliot (1835–1915), published a huge book on the family, measuring 61 cm by 48 cm (24 in by 19 in), with plates drawn by Joseph Wolf (1820–99), a German artist who had settled in London. Wolf was already recognised as one of the great zoological artists of his time, whose pictures not only brought splendour to scientific publications but, on occasion, were hung in London’s Royal Academy of Arts. He must surely have known of Wallace’s description, for the book he illustrated for Elliot is dedicated to Wallace. Even so, the individual that dominates his plate of the Greater Bird is shown with relaxed plumes. Only in the distance and on a much smaller scale does he portray the display posture, and then he does so rather hesitantly – and inaccurately.
Greater Birds of Paradise, two males and a female. Hand-coloured lithograph by Joseph Wolf and Joseph Smit from D. G. Elliot’s Monograph of the Paradiseidae (1873).
He was bolder with his picture of the Lesser Bird. This plate is certainly one of the glories of Elliot’s book, and it shows the bird with plumes erect in a spectacular haze that extends to the very margins of the huge plate. Glorious though it is, it too in its details fails to match Wallace’s description.
Strangely, when in 1869 Wallace himself published his much delayed account of his travels, the artist T.W. Wood, who was given the task of providing the illustrations, also failed to show the birds’ display posture correctly, and makes it appear that the plumes sprout from above rather than beneath the wings. It seems very odd that such an accurate and meticulous observer as Wallace did not correct him.
In the year 1874, the challenge was taken up by the most famous ornithological publisher of his time, John Gould. (1804 – 1881). Gould had started his scientific career with the Zoological Society of London, where as taxidermist he had the responsibility of preserving the mortal remains of the rare animals that died in the Society’s Gardens, the London Zoo. In 1830, he had published a set of illustrations based on a collection of bird skins that had been sent to the Society by a collector working in the Himalayas. It proved to be a great success and it set the pattern for the publications which occupied him for the rest of his life.
Each work Gould produced was issued in parts, each part containing a dozen or so plates accompanied by a scientific text written by Gould himself. The plates were spectacular, approximately 55 cm tall and 37 cm wide (22 inches × 14 inches), and each species had a plate to itself. Gould himself had little talent as an artist but in most cases he would make a rough sketch showing the composition he had in mind which he gave to an artist. Initially this was his wife, but after her untimely death he engaged a succession