An introduction to the world's most visually stunning and remarkable birds that are hidden away in the most rugged and inaccessible island on Earth.
It's caturday, but today's video will make you think this day should be renamed to honour birds. This is because I am sharing a video that will inspire you and that may change you forever.
Ever since I read influential biogeographer and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel's book, The Malay Archipelago, as a child, I fell in love with the region, and particularly with its amazing birds. One of my favourite bird families, the birds-of-paradise live only on New Guinea, a few nearby islands, and a small part of northern Australia. The birds-of-paradise, Paradisaeidae, form a family of songbirds comprised of 39 (41?) species. These birds, whose ancestor was a member of the crow family, evolved a spectacular range of plumage colours, structures and patterns that the males display in complex courtship dances to woo females.
Long known about by Western scientists, artists and explorers, these birds are poorly understood because few people have seen them in nature. They live in the most remote, rugged and inacessible areas on Earth, which makes them almost impossible to study, to watch, and to photograph.
"Nature seems to have taken every precaution that these, her choicest treasures, may not lose value by being too easily obtained", as Wallace wrote in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1862 (p. 160).
When Tim's National Geographic article was published in 2007, they had managed to photograph half of all birds-of-paradise species. Of course, this inspired them to plan to photograph the remainder of these birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Geographic Expeditions Council, and Conservation International provided funding necessary for the team to continue their work by conducting expeditions into ever more remote parts of New Guinea.
By the time they photographed the last species eight years later, they had made 18 expeditions, stayed in 51 different field camps, climbed hundreds of trees, built dozens of blinds, made thousands of video and audio recordings, spent more than a year and a half of cumulative time in the field, and taken more than 39,000 photos. The last species they documented? The Jobi manucode, Manucodia jobiensis, a glossy blue-black bird that outshines an obsidian.
You can purchase some of Laman and Scholes' remarkable photographs, which are featured in their book, Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World's Most Extraordinary Birds [National Geographic, 2012; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US]. But the book is only the beginning -- there is so much more the the Birds-of-paradise Project.
This video shows you a little about the project to document all species of the birds-of-paradise on film:
This autumn, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Geographic will share the Birds-of-Paradise Project with the world. But you can get a sneak peak now: in this sneak peak, you will learn about New Guinea, the scientists and photographers behind this project, the remarkable birds on the Birds of Paradise Project website. This interactive website includes free lesson plans for your classroom, and lists the dates for when the traveling museum exhibition will pop up in your city. The project is designed to show the diverse strategies of evolution that are at work in this avian family so you can experience one of nature's truly extraordinary wonders. I've been playing with their beautifully-designed website for more than an hour, and there's still so much more to explore.
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Although GrrlScientist deeply longs to be in the rainforests of New Guinea, studying birds, she instead can be found here: Maniraptora. She's very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
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