A historian's perspective 

Shopkeeper: “remarkable bird…beautiful plumage in’t it?" 

Disgruntled customer: "The plumage don’t enter into it! It’s stone Dead!" 

"The Dead Parrot sketch," performed on Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969) 

A superlative name for a regal bird, this ‘King’ Bird of Paradise joins other species with grand monikers such as the ‘Emperor’, ‘Greater’, ‘Superb’ and ‘Magnificent’ Birds of Paradise. But like Monty Python’s comic argument about the dead parrot, the Bird of Paradise has inspired cosmic confusion and insatiable greed among those who wished to name, own and profit from these birds.  

Across lowland forests in Papua New Guinea, West Papua and the Aru Islands, the male King Bird of Paradise captivate females with its bright colouring and distinctive wire-like tail feathers. Local communities have long protected this bird as part of their ongoing culture and incorporate only select feathers from adult male birds in headdresses worn on ceremonial occasions. Entranced by the plumage but with no knowledge of the bird itself, Asian and then European traders created a global market for birds of paradise feathers. As locals sold the skinned birds with their feet removed, Europeans thought that these birds had no feet, and that they somehow spent their lives in the air, only dropping to earth when they died. In the sixteenth century Europeans even named a brightly-coloured constellation after the Bird of Paradise using the Greek word Apus ‘without feet’.  

In the eighteenth century more names followed. This species was given its Latin names by the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, and in the next century a French ornithologist added the genus name ‘Cicinnurus’ which recalled its curly tail feathers. In South Africa, thousands of miles from the bird’s habitat in Papua New Guinea/West Papua, Europeans named a local flower the ‘bird of paradise’. British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks gave the flower that resembled the bird the Latin names ‘Strelitzia Reginae’ [‘Queen of Strelitz’] in honour of Britain’s Queen Charlotte, who came from the German state of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. 

Both the flower and the bird continued to enchant both royal and ordinary consumers around the world. In Nepal the king and prime minister wore feathers from the Greater Bird of Paradise on ceremonial occasions. Feathers from the King Bird of Paradise became the second most imported variety into Europe and America for use as hair and hat ornaments. The ‘plume boom’ reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before legislation drastically reduced the supply and fashions changed. Despite strict laws limiting hunting of these birds and sale of their feathers, however, Birds of Paradise remain highly prized and an illegal trade continues today.  

When this specimen was collected in the 1870s-90s, increasing numbers of birds were also being hunted by naturalists for museum collections around the world, including Australia. The presentation of this bird dates from a time when the old museum method of exhibiting birds as flat bundles of skins, often with claws and beak tied either end, changed. Here the King Bird of Paradise is presented as a ‘living sculpture’, with the animal stuffed and positioned on a perch to show off its defining features such as its long wire-like tail feathers – as well as its feet. 

While museum displays like this help us to learn more about the Bird of Paradise than people in the past, we still lack the close engagement and cultural context of the communities who live alongside Birds of Paradise in their native habitat. For people in Papua New Guinea and West Papua, this King Bird of Paradise will always be more than its plumage and never simply a ‘dead parrot’.  

Cindy McCreery

 I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, whose land I walk, work, and gather on every day. 

Dr. Cindy McCreery is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney and director of the Modern Monarchy in Global Perspective Research Hub. Her current research and teaching uses visual culture (paintings, engravings, photographs etc.) and objects (like stuffed birds) to explore the relationships between monarchies, colonies and people in and beyond the British empire from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. The university’s museum collections are a constant source of inspiration. Since 2021 many of her undergraduate and Honours History units utilize an ‘object-based learning’ approach grounded in the collections of Chau Chak Wing Museum.  

Hear more from Cindy:

Modern Monarchy in Global Perspective

Twitter: @drcindymccreery

              @monarchy_global

An economic geographer's perspective

The King Bird of Paradise (Cicinnurus regius) was one of the first birds of paradise seen (dead) by Europeans as it was relatively abundant in Indonesia’s spice islands, where traders would collect skins alongside the nutmeg and cloves so highly valued during the early colonial age.  

This “thing of beauty” attracted Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist, to visit the Aru Islands in 1857. The local community in Aru, who helped Wallace in his collecting, called the birds goby-goby, while the trading Malays called it burung raja (the king bird). Wallace was probably the first European to observe the bird (live) in its natural habitat: “it frequents the lower trees of the less dense forests, and is very active, flying strongly with a whirring sound, and continually hopping or flying from branch to branch… fluttering its wings in the manner of the South American manakins, at which time it elevates and expands the beautiful fans with which its breast is adorned”.1 Anyone fortunate enough to have experienced a paradise bird dancing in a patch of tropical forest inevitably shares Wallace’s sense of wonder. It’s a feeling of awe poorly conveyed through taxidermied specimens such as this, which nevertheless attracted enormous scientific curiosity in Victorian England. This curiosity fueled demand from private collectors and museums in Europe, and ultimately funded Wallace’s eight years travelling across “The Malay Archipelago”.  

It’s difficult to know how we should relate to such objects and the endeavours they represent today, tied up as they were with both a broader imperial project and a highly extractive relationship with the natural world (Wallace’s description of collecting orangutan skins in Borneo makes for particularly uncomfortable reading). Yet, Wallace also made significant scientific advances based on such expeditions, most famously formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection and sending his essay to Charles Darwin prior to The Origin of Species being published. He also made groundbreaking contributions to biogeography (The Wallace Line), became an early environmentalist, worked closely and sympathetically with indigenous peoples, and was a progressive social reformer. Our relationship with colonial history, embodied within objects like NHB.2317, continues to defy narrow simplifications of the past. 

1 Wallace, Alfred Russel (2008[1869]). The Malay Archipelago. Periplus Editions, Singapore. p. 339.

Jeff Neilson is an Associate Professor of Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. He is also the Indonesia Country Coordinator for the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Jeff's research focuses on economic geography, environmental governance and rural development in Southeast Asia. His research interests are diverse and include issues of food security and food sovereignty, agrarian reform movements, sustainable livelihoods, agroecology, deforestation and the global coffee and cocoa industries. Jeff is a fluent Indonesian language speaker and has conducted extended periods of ethnographic field research in the Toraja region of Sulawesi, where he pursues research in cultural change, customary law, landscape history, and the ceremonial economy. 

Hear more from Jeff:

University of Sydney profile

Google scholar

An artist and cartoonist's interpretation 

The vibrant feathers are systematically arranged with a three-dimensional aesthetic to exalt the physicality of a magnificent “Cicinnurus Regius,” the Bird of paradise (Linnaeus,1758).

Imbuing character is the taxidermist’s raison d’etre, creating an illusion of life. These birds in the historical redwood cabinet have lost habitat and become endangered. Documenting a sculptural physical likeness presents invaluable and safely stored aesthetic knowledge. We rely on the art and skills of a figurative sculptor investing in the importance in retaining this physicality.  

Video and digitised imagery will capture flight and record real time images of the pre-extinct. But I wonder, will it ever capture a “tactile truth”?

Turning to my own digital painting practice, and this question of the object’s “touch and feel” quality I ask myself: Does it have less true colour and dimensionality? Can it ever be answered by third party representation or does the expertise of taxidermy remain essential to our study to the perception of reality in the future. The feathers on the bird of paradise bring us closer to the sentient nature of a bird from a lost paradise. This creature needs to create a dancing tree habitat to show its paternal prowess. Will future generations feel poorer, not being able to touch and engage with a sculptured experience of a paradise lacking tangible real colourful feathers? 

The preservation of these interactive tangibles can only deepen intelligent future generational discourse.  

Eric Löbbecke, born 1966, Sydney based artist and Waverley resident for 43 years. Exhibiting fine art painting, practiced since 2008 alongside his professional cartooning/illustration career drawing for THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper since 1988. Finalist in the waverley art prize and the Dobell Drawing Prize in 2008, 4 times Walkley award recipient, ACA cartoonist of the year 1993, and first prize in the Amnesty international Australian Media awards. In 2019 after completing 2 Masters of fine art degrees at UNSW Art & Design, one in coursework, followed up with a research grant, he attended the Cartooning Global conference in Paris, presenting “WORK IN PROGRESS” a new cartoonist working Model. He also spoke on (Disrupting Traditional Cartooning in the Digital Age) at the 26th AHSN Annual Conference at Griffith University 2020. In 2023 he presented his “Listening Devices” body of work at Sydney University, which preceded “Overwhelming” paintings, a second solo exhibition at Stella Downer Fine Art in April. 

Eric’s art practice continues his research on new technology as an adaptive tool for painters to create paintings utilising the traditional analogue methodologies, to digitally create “Unique 2d artworks” through a process of sculpture, digital painting outputted on canvas, enhanced by a final application of oil painting. His subjects are temporal “Random thought” observations of our time in history past and present, to document the creation of new language and the emergence of a more inclusive voice.

He is currently represented by Stella Downer Fine Art. 

See more of Eric’s work:

https://www.ericlobbecke.com 

A conservation biologist's perspective

Few species capture the essence of sexual selection quite like birds of paradise. 

Males like this specimen are highly ornamented: bright red heads, white chests and long tailed feathers. These are used in elaborate displays to impress females, who in contrast are drab brown and well camouflaged for the forest. The showiness of the male is a real danger, making him stand out to predators that includes humans who go to great lengths to score their feathers. Makes one marvel at how such seemingly suicidal traits could have ever evolved.

Most people know of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection but he himself wondered how traits that make individuals attract the attention of predators could evolve when camouflage is best for survival. But in his theory of evolution by sexual selection it is females that have most influence on the male traits that survive to the next generation. 

Thus for some species, individual male survival is less important than a female’s choice to mate with him. And her decision about what is attractive is why in so many birds, males are noisy and colourful while females are quite and camouflaged, and why male peacocks have such elaborate and unwieldy tails and females don’t. And of course we wonder does theory have any relevance to humans? 

Peter Banks is Professor in Conservation Biology in the University of Sydney's School of Life and Environmental Sciences. His research aims to develop humane, ecologically based solutions for the impact of invasive species.

Hear more from Peter:

Behavioural Ecology and Conservation research group