Interesting piece in today’s The Canberra Times from Ian Warden, supported by one of GD’s whimsies. It sort of laments the male positive sex ratio of the appearance of Gang-gang Cockatoo artwork around Canberra
and proposes in passing, more Koels. I suspect he is right that artwork does favour males. However there is no doubt another reason and that is that painting males (at least of those two species) is so much easier. Any two tone shape that is sort of right,
with dark grey and red in the right place can uniquely represent a male Gang-gang Cockatoo. However getting a female identifiable without detail is so much harder. Painting a female well is much harder than a male, due to all the delicate yellow and red barring.
Also painting a male Koel is pretty easy, just black but painting a female Koel is a substantial task, due to the complex pattern of narrow barring and spotting of many shades of browns.
Philip
