Raggiana Bird-of-Paradise. Paradisaea raggiana
I went in to the Field Museum today to work in the prep lab, and afterwards nosed around the bird collections. This is a very old skin of a Raggiana Bird-of-Paradise (Paradisaea raggiana.) It's of the male's tail feathers, which are spectacular, of course. They belong to the Paradisaeidae family, which also includes the Lesser and Greater Bird-of-paradise, and are native to New Guinea. I took a lot of specimen photos and will post more next week. Have a lovely weekend!
Hi Diana,Do these feathers look stunning? I can see some beautiful pale fronds there, but when you see these birds on TV they are amazing, so I just wondered how strong the colours are. Very interesting that work of yours!
ReplyDeleteHi Julie - Even though this is a very old specimen, and there is a tiny bit of fading, the colors are very vibrant. Not so much in the tail feathers that I photographed here, but the rest of the bird has a lot of emerald green and deep yellow.
ReplyDeleteThank-you for that Diana. I have sadly had to pick up 2 quite large birds in my garden that have died. The first a female sparrowhawk, which crashed into a window, I took it the vets to try and save it, but it died, the second was a magpie, it was freezing at the time, and I tried to revive it, but it was dead the following day. Both times I was so moved by just how fantastic the feathers were, they are absolutely stunning, I felt priveliged to see them, but sad that they were gone. We should appreciate what amazing works of art they are.Thanks for your posts.
ReplyDeleteI love that historic tag! One of my favorite parts of museum collections are the old tags with beautiful handwriting. It's like it was required that all curatorial staff have impeccable penmanship.
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