Recently I got Drawn from Paradise, which is at least as awesome as The Lost Birds of Paradise which my last post was about. I haven't read all of it yet, but so far I haven't found any reference to the other book I wrote about last time, the one by Tim Laman and Ed Scholes (it's not in the index). However, I did notice a few observations about bird of paradise behavior that I thought may have been taken from Laman and Scholes' book. For example, the chapter about the 12-wired Bird of Paradise mentions that the male's special "wire" feathers are used to tickle the female's face, a fact I seem to remember reading that Laman and Scholes had discovered- I'll have to double check. *
One really cool thing I found in Drawn from Paradise relates to a painting, reproduced in the book, which is part of a series by the 17th-century Dutch artist Frans Snyders which depict a large group of birds of different species singing together, with an owl conducting them from a score. Attenborough and Fuller include this painting because there is a Greater Bird of Paradise in it, but their caption also mentions that the inspiration for these paintings may have been the observation of mixed flocks of songbirds converging around a roosting owl and scolding it. A taxidermied version of this behavior, which is known as mobbing, can be seen in the Japanese scene in the Museum of Natural History's hall of Birds of the World. I also wrote a tune that represents mobbing; it is the third movement of Bird Lives. The bass represents the owl.
More updates to come.
-Elijah
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