Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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However, Lear’s work is beaten, price-wise, by a similar work from the other side of the English Channel. Pre-dating Lear by about 30 years, Francois Levaillant’s work Histoire naturelle des perroquets (1801-1805), or Natural History of Parrots, sold for $225,463 back in 2007.

 

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Sharpe's Birds of Paradise

Which brings me to the book in my possession I wanted to share with you. Dedicated entirely to birds of paradise and bower-birds, it is one of the greatest bird books and, for many, the most beautiful ever created. Needless to say it is not an original, which would set me back a cool $90,000. This is the Folio Society Facsimile Edition, published at the actual size of 21.5"x15", and it's pretty awesome. (Here I'm combining some photos of my copy along with others culled from the internet, as I'm not really equipped to take good photos.)

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Richard Bowdler Sharpe (22 November 1847 – 25 December 1909) was an English zoologist and ornithologist who worked as curator of the bird collection at the British Museum of Natural History. In the course of his career he published several monographs on bird groups and produced a multi-volume catalogue of the specimens in the collection of the museum. He described several new species of bird and a several species of bird including Sharpe's longclaw (Hemimacronyx sharpei) and Sharpe's pied-babbler (Turdoides sharpei) are named in his honour.

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His Monograph of the Paradiseidae, or Birds of Paradise, and Ptilonorhynchidae, or Bower-Birds was first published by Henry Sotheran & Co. of London, in two volumes, between 1891 and 1898.

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Sharpe was Assistant Keeper of the British Museum’s Zoology Department, and had collaborated with John Gould on The Birds of New Guinea.

 

Papua New Guinea is remote by anyone’s standards. It’s the world’s largest tropical island, its forest-clad mountains and ravines home to bird and animal species found nowhere else on the planet.

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Initially employed as a taxidermist [he was known as the 'bird-stuffer'] by the Zoological Society, Gould's fascination with birds from the east began in the "late 1820s [when] a collection of birds from the Himalayan mountains arrived at the Society's museum and Gould conceived the idea of publishing a volume of imperial folio sized hand-coloured lithographs of the eighty species, with figures of a hundred birds. Gould's friend and mentor N. A. Vigors supplied the text. Elizabeth Gould made the drawings and transferred them to the large lithographic stones. Having failed to find a publisher, Gould undertook to publish the work himself; it appeared in twenty monthly parts, four plates to a part, and was completed ahead of schedule. He never claimed he was the artist for these plates, but repeatedly wrote of the 'rough sketches' he made from which, with reference to the specimens, his artists painted the finished drawings.

 

Following Gould’s death in 1881, Sharpe set out to create an entirely new work dedicated entirely to birds of paradise and to bower-birds, then thought to be related to birds of paradise. Sharpe chose John Gerrard Keulemans and William Matthew Hart as the artists for the project. Both were specialists in the subject; many of Keulemans’s works can still be found on display in the American Museum of Natural History.

 

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Once printed, the plates were coloured in by hand, a laborious and skilled process. Three of Sharpe’s ten daughters were colourists who had worked on other ornithological books, and it is possible that they contributed to their father’s masterpiece. Certainly the hand-colouring is of a quality and sophistication that mark the culmination of a great tradition, evincing skills that modern practitioners find impossible to match.

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With their extravagant, sweeping plumage and glorious iridescent colours, birds of paradise appear almost mythical: indeed it was once thought that they lived entirely in the air, only falling to the ground when they died. Their plumes have been exchanged as currency and worn in sovereigns’ crowns, and they played a part in helping Darwin, together with A . R. Wallace, formulate his theory of evolution.

Edited December 23, 2017 by Flex Mentallo

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Societies of New Guinea often use bird-of-paradise plumes in their dress and rituals, and the plumes were popular in Europe in past centuries as adornment for ladies' millinery. Hunting for plumes and habitat destruction have reduced some species to endangered status; habitat destruction due to deforestation is now the predominant threat

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The Huli tribe (photos by Jimmy Nelson)

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The Huli or Haroli are an indigenous people who live in the Southern Highlands districts of Tari, Koroba, Margaraima and Komo, of Papua New Guinea. The Huli have lived in their region for 1,000 years and recount lengthy oral histories relating to individuals and their clans. They were extensive travellers (predominantly for trade) in both the highlands and lowlands surrounding their homeland, particularly to the south.

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Another reason they are famous is because they paint their faces, usually with yellow, red, and white decorations. They also make wigs from their own hair. The wigs look more like plumed hats, and they are not only intricately decorated with feathers of paradise birds, but also with the feathers from colorful parrots. The indispensable complement of their outfit is an axe with a Cassowary claw. The back side of a Huli tribesman’s throat is ornamented by various decorations, the most striking of which is a beak of a hornbill.

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The Huli were not known to Europeans until November 1934, when at least fifty of them were killed by the Fox brothers, two adventurers unsuccessfully looking for gold who had just parted with the more famous explorers Mick and Dan Leahy. But that's another story.

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So there we are, there's a beginning. From collecting books through ornithology to anthropology, and the passing of paradise. Whatever next?

Edited December 23, 2017 by Flex Mentallo

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“Knowledge is only rumour, until it is in the muscle.”

 

old New Guinean proverb

 

 

Edited December 23, 2017 by Flex Mentallo

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Photography, stealer of souls, or compassionate chronicle?