Great bird of paradise
| Great bird of paradise | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Male (above) and female (below) of the Great Bird of Paradise, in the background another male in courtship pose |
||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Paradisaea apoda | ||||||||||||
| Linnaeus , 1758 |
The great bird of paradise ( Paradisaea apoda ) is a species from the genus of the actual birds of paradise ( Paradisaea ) within the family of the birds of paradise (Paradisaeidae). It inhabits large parts of the lowlands in southern New Guinea and the Aru Islands off the coast of New Guinea . The species lives in forests where it feeds on fruits and invertebrates . The splendid, colorful and vocal group courtship takes place at traditional places ( leks ) in the treetops, where up to 15 males gather. They are sought out by the females, who usually only mate with a few dominant males. The female is solely responsible for building nests and raising young.
The species was already described by Linnaeus in 1758 . Since the natives of the Moluccas had told the Magellans sailors that the birds had been sent from heaven, they became known as "birds of paradise". Only bellows without feet reached Europe, so that for a long time it was believed that the animals were also "footless" in nature (Greek αποδος ). Linnaeus therefore chose the scientific species name Paradisaea apoda .
description
Body type and measurements
The male of the Great Bird of Paradise is 43 cm long (without the greatly elongated shafts of the central control feathers) , the size of a crow , while the female is slightly smaller at 35 cm. The difference is particularly evident in the wing length . Males of the nominate form have a wing length of 22.5 to 24 centimeters. In the females, the wing measures 19.4 to 21.5 centimeters. The male's greatly elongated middle pair of control feathers is 50 to 85.4 centimeters long. The rest of the tail plumage has a length of 15.6 to 17.5 centimeters. Similar to the Little Bird of Paradise , the middle pair of control feathers in the female is shorter than the rest of the tail plumage. It measures 13.2 to 15.2 inches, while the remaining tail plumage measures 14.1 to 15.8 inches. The beak measures 3.8 to 4.8 centimeters in both sexes.
Little weight data is available for females so far. These weighed between 170 and 173 grams.
male
In males of the nominate form , the bill is bluish-gray, the iris is yellow. The area from the forehead over the lower edge of the eye to over the ear covers and the throat is shimmering emerald green. The nostrils are covered by protruding feathers. The vertex, the back of the head and the neck are light to orange-yellow with a silvery sheen. The blackish brown color of the upholstered, bulging chest runs towards the belly in dark brown and medium brown as well as a brownish rose on the leg fletching and under tail covers. The upper side including the control feathers is chestnut brown from the back with a somewhat darker tint on the back and the small arm covers as well as a light orange-yellow color on the outer edges of the large arm covers. The two central control springs are greatly elongated and reduced to blackish, wire-like shafts. They only have brown flags at the base. The most noticeable feature of the male, however, are the greatly elongated flank feathers, which are intensely yellow at the base and have chestnut-colored shaft strokes and which become increasingly whitish towards the end and take on a downy, puffy expression. The legs and feet are gray-pink.
Females and young birds
The female is completely brown in color, the head and front breast are very dark and the upper side, which is partially present in the male, lacks an orange-yellow tint. The central control springs are narrower and more pointed than the others, but not elongated.
The youth dress has not yet been described. Immature birds are very similar to females; subadult males, especially on the head, increasingly show feathers of the adult dress. It can take at least five to six years until they are fully colored.
Distribution and subspecies
The Great Bird of Paradise inhabits the lowlands south of the central mountain range in New Guinea and the Aru Islands to the south . In New Guinea the distribution ranges from Timika eastwards to the watershed of the Fly and Strickland Rivers .
Sometimes two subspecies are described, whereby the nominate form , which is native to the Aru Islands, differs in its smaller size as well as a stronger chestnut-colored body plumage and a lighter breast. Other authors regard the species as monotypic because of the difficulty in distinguishing the populations .
- P. a. novaeguineae D'Albertis & Salvadori , 1879 - New Guinea
- P. a. apoda Linnaeus , 1758 - Aru Islands
The species hybridizes in southern New Guinea with the Raggi bird of paradise , where leks with male hybrids between the two species have not been found infrequently .
Way of life
The great bird of paradise inhabits forests in the lowlands and hills. The height distribution extends at least up to 950 m.
As far as is known, the diet consists of fruits and invertebrates . Female-colored individuals are regularly observed in small groups looking for food. They also socialize with bright paradise crows and other fruit-eating species. Adult males live as solitary animals away from the leks.
Reproduction
The great bird of paradise is polygynous , which means that a male mates with several females whenever possible. Nest building and young rearing are the sole responsibility of the female.
Courtship and courtship
The group courtship takes place at traditional leks, which often exist for several decades. They are usually located just below the treetops in the branches of tall, spreading trees, in which up to 15 males or more on branches that are as horizontal as possible occupy their courtship areas, from which they free the foliage. The best spots are in the middle and are occupied by older, experienced and dominant males. The ranking is fought out in fights before the courtship begins. The ranking is often subject to a certain tradition, so that there are usually fewer fights on long-standing leks. Where both species occur together, males of the great one as well as of the Raggi bird of paradise can be found on some leks.
Once the order of precedence has been established, the aggressions settle and with the visits of females in the lek, the courtship enters the decisive phase. It begins with the scattered males going to their courtship places at the same time ( Convergence Display ) and changing at irregular intervals between a very upright sitting ( Wing Pose ) and a more sloping courtship pose ( Pump Display ) and jumping around. The courtship is accompanied by loud calls. In the second part of the courtship display ( static display ), the males assume a rigid pose in which the wings are raised and the head is lowered. The flank feathers are particularly evident and the females can "inspect" the individual candidates. Here, the courtship may end or it follows the phase of copulation ( Copulation Display ), for which most females choose the dominant male on the middle seats. With increasing, forwards and backwards jumping movements along the branch, the male approaches the female and makes clicking sounds. It surrounds the female with its wings in order to eventually jump over and copulate.
Nest and clutch
The only nest that has been described so far was a flat, bowl-like structure in the fork of a large tree with a diameter of 21 cm. The base consisted of leaves, the bowl made of stems of orchids or climbing plants and pyrrosia- like fern fronds, which was lined with fine tendrils. The clutch consists of an egg. In captivity, the incubation period was between 16 and 17 days; the young hatched within 12 to 46 hours and left the nest after 18 to 20 days. They were self-employed after 29 to 32 days.
Great bird of paradise and human
Use of springs and bellows
The hides and feathers of numerous birds of paradise are processed into traditional head and body decorations by the indigenous ethnic groups of New Guinea. This also applies to the Great Bird of Paradise, whose feathers and bellows are a coveted trade and prestige object in New Guinea. The headdress, for which both complete bellows and individual feathers are used, is almost exclusively worn by men on special ceremonial occasions. Outside of these special occasions, the bellows are rolled up between bast mats and stored in the beams of traditional houses, where the smoke from the cooking fires protects them from insect damage. In the 1970s, it was found that the population of Great Birds of Paradise was significantly decreasing in the regions where rifles were introduced. Where this was not yet the case, the numbers remained comparatively high. The individuals of this species were also noticeably tamer there.
In the period from around 1880 to 1920, feathers and bellows of this type were also used by the western fashion industry to make decorative feathers for hats.
The great bird of paradise is one of the few species in which the feathers also have a traditional meaning outside of New Guinea. The flank feathers of the Great Bird of Paradise have adorned the headgear of high-ranking members of the Nepalese royal court for centuries. They were worn by the king, the prime minister and generals on special ceremonial occasions. Before the export ban, the feathers came from New Guinea to Nepal via traditional trade routes. The Nepalese crown uses particularly long flank feathers, which emerge from a jeweled setting like a horse's tail.
attitude
The British naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726–1798) mentioned that a living Great Bird of Paradise had been sent to Great Britain before 1790. René Primevère Lesson (1794–1849) mentioned that in 1828 he had seen two Great Birds of Paradise on the Indonesian island of Ambon that a Chinese merchant had kept.
One of the zoological gardens that kept this species comparatively early is the New York Zoological Society, which kept several Great Birds of Paradise in 1935 and 1936.
Trivia
- On a side island of the island of Tobago off the north coast of South America, there was a small free-living population of Great Birds of Paradise that had been released into the wild on this island for over 75 years. It then died out due to repeated habitat destruction by hurricanes. Numerous observations on courtship display of this species have been made in these birds.
- At the coronation of the Nepalese King Mahendra in 1957, the feathers of the Great Bird of Paradise still in the possession of the Nepalese royal family, which traditionally wear the crown and headgear of high-ranking members of the court, were largely damaged. Due to the export ban that has now been passed, feathers can no longer be legally acquired on the trade route. At the suggestion of the ornithologist Ernest Thomas Gilliard , representatives of the US Embassy sent feathers to the Nepalese royal family, which had long been in the American Museum of Natural History since customs confiscation .
literature
- Bruce M. Beehler, Thane K. Pratt: Birds of New Guinea; Distribution, Taxonomy, and Systematics. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2016, ISBN 978-0-691-16424-3 .
- Clifford B. Frith, Bruce M. Beehler : The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998, ISBN 0-19-854853-2 .
- Eugene M McCarthy: Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2006, ISBN 0-19-518323-1 .
Unless otherwise noted, the information in this article has been obtained from the following sources:
- Clifford Frith, Dawn Frith: Greater Bird-of-paradise (Paradisaea apoda) (2009) In: J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, AD Christie, E. de Juana (Eds.): Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona 2014.
- Clifford Frith, Dawn Frith, Arnau Bonan: Family Paradisaeidae (2013) In: J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, AD Christie, E. de Juana (Eds.): Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona 2014.
Web links
- Paradisaea apoda in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2012. Posted by: BirdLife International, 2012. Retrieved on July 2, 2015.
- Videos, photos and sound recordings of Paradisaea apoda in the Internet Bird Collection
- xeno-canto: sound recordings - Greater bird-of-paradise ( paradisaea apoda )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 448.
- ↑ JA Jobling: Key to Scientific Names in Ornithology (2015) in: J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, AD Christie, E. de Juana (eds.): Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive , Lynx Edicions, Barcelona 2015
- ↑ a b Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 449.
- ↑ a b Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 146.
- ↑ Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 143.
- ↑ a b c d Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 456.
- ↑ Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 452.
- ↑ Frith & Beehler: The Birds of Paradise - Paradisaeidae. P. 147.