Fwd: [canberrabirds] 'B' is for Blood's Bird of Paradise

["martin butterfield" <>]

On checking the AMNH site for this Hall they do refer to a diorama of birds of New Guinea, so Geoffrey is right.  I have no idea why it is not included on the main diorama page. 

 

Obviously I missed this Hall on my visits or what I saw there didn't stick in my brain. 

 

Martin

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Geoffrey Dabb <>
Date: Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 10:16 PM
Subject: 'B' is for Blood's Bird of Paradise
To: martin butterfield <>

I think it's there.  It's in the 'Whitney Memorial Hall of Oceanic Birds', but that site doesn't detail the individual dioramas.

 

From: martin butterfield [
Sent: Thursday, 3 April 2008 5:58 PM
To: Geoffrey Dabb
Cc:
Subject: Re: [canberrabirds] 'B' is for Blood's Bird of Paradise

 

Geoffrey

 

We spent some time in the AMNH on our recent sojourn in Metropolis (Gothan City apparently starts at 14th St and heads South) but the diorama you mentioned rang no bells.  On checking their website http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dioramas/gallery/ it didn't seem to be in the list either.  It is still an interesting place to spend a few hours  - especially during the week when it isn't quite so crowded.

 

Martin

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Geoffrey Dabb <> wrote:

Blood's Bird of Paradise was named for N.B. Blood.  Neptune ('Ned') Beresford Blood was on active service in WW2 when he first saw the Wahgi Valley in New Guinea's central highlands.  Staying on in NG, he gave Edward Hallstrom the idea for a pioneering sheep-raising project which was established at Nondugl in the Wahgi Valley, together with a small zoological collection.  Blood was the first manager of the station, collecting wildlife, including live specimens of birds of paradise.    Later the station was transferred to the Administration and eventually closed, with the BoP collection being transferred to Baiyer River, still a good place to see these birds if you visit the PNG highlands.  There is more about the Wahgi Valley and the Nondugl of those days  in Colin Simpson's book Adam in Plumes 1954.

 

Blood sent a large number of specimens to the Australian Museum, where they so excited Tom Iredale that he decided to write a book on the subject, Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds (1950).  In this he records the new species Paradisea bloodi.  Iredale mentions the possibility that this was a hybrid between a Blue and the red-plumed raggiana, but rejects that possibility on ground of distribution of those species.  He says of the single specimen 'this bird must be seen to be admired and understood'.  Here is Lilian Medland's drawing (omitting the full streamers) :

 

 

Iredale's museumy book, like his other 2 volumes on New Guinea birds, can reasonably be criticised on several grounds.  However there were precious few references on NG birds at that time.  Furthermore, birds of paradise, apart perhaps from the 'common' one, were hard to come across, and a kind of substitute was being able to goggle at the generous number of species (some 80!) pictured in the book.

 

In the early 1960s I spent some weeks in Madang, staying at the Madang Hotel.  Ned Blood, then based there with the Department of Agriculture, Stock and Fisheries, used to drink at what might be loosely called the public bar, a hose-downable Quonset-hut annexure to the main hostelry.  On the subject of his BBoP, he was inclined himself to doubt the validity of the species.  However he pointed out to me a Thomas Gilliard, an American ornithologist also staying at the pub who was an authority on NG birds. This was of some interest to me as Gilliard had authored Living Birds of the World, one of the first of what has become a stream of popular surveys of world bird families.  He was working on a handbook of New Guinea birds.   (He collected birds in the Port Moresby hinterland just after WW2, and was, I later found, responsible for the evocative bird diorama in the American Museum of Natural History depicting the Rouna Falls area, near the start of the Kokoda Track  -  worth a look when you're in New York, if it's still there.)

 

Gilliard had no doubt that bloodi was a hybrid.  I remember his telling me that hybridisation in BoPs was not unusual, one reason being that species were very specific to particular altitudes, and population pressures in the highlands (there had been a people explosion since pre-European introduction of the sweet potato) had caused clearing of great zones of forest.  This had forced remnants of species in the cleared zones up or down into the domain of other species.

 

In his own Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds, published in 1969 after his death, Gilliard lists 18 named hybrids, one being Paradisea bloodi, given as a cross between the Blue and raggiana.   With its omission from recent books on New Guinea birds, Blood's Bird of Paradise has all but faded from current memories.