Oji Birds of Paradise in the West Indies. 35


Apply this little picture to the whole country ; and I hope it

may be realized what a friend and ally man has in the Live Birds,

how hopeless his toil and how helpless he would be without them,

and how, if he loves his country, he ought (for the most part) to

cherish and preserve them and their eggs, instead of carelessly

slaughtering them, or recklessly turning them into “ specimens ” for

Love of Science, for Love of Dress, or for any other love whatever.



BIRDS OF PARADISE IN THE

WEST INDIES.


By Collingwood Ingram.


Although Birds of Paradise have been known to Europeans

since the sixteenth century, our knowledge of them until compara¬

tively recent times was limited to a few imperfect skins and some

idle tales invented by the earlier Portuguese or Spanish navigators.

Of these travellers’ tales possibly the most fanciful was the one that

led to the Greater Bird of Paradise being described as “the bird

without any feet, which flies about continuously and never sleeps ! ”

This fable undoubtedly arose from the fact that in most of the old

native-made skins the feet were wanting, and Linnseus has unwit¬

tingly perpetuated the fallacy by calling the bird Paradisea apoda!


Since then our knowledge has gradually accumulated. Wallace

met with this and other forms of the family Paradiseidae during his

wanderings in the Malay Archipelago. Then their curiously marked

eggs—for so many years the coveted prize of every oologist—were

discovered, and now the living birds themselves have been imported

into England.


It seems that the Greater Bird of Paradise has lately become

very scarce in its native home, the Aru Islands, Dutch New Guinea.

This marked diminution is doubtless attributable to the great demand


Yol. II. One of the young birds found her way, indirectly, to the Zoological

Gardens ; and, later, certain papers were not slow in trumpeting abroad the

intelligence that a Burrowing Owl had been bred at the Zoo. But that the

mother herself had been bred in my aviary was too insignificant a trifle to be

thought worthy of mention!—R. P.



