Male Ribbon-tailed Astrapia, Astrapia mayeri on Schefflera sp. (31 August 2008).Image: markaharper1 (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)
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.
As a child, I read the book The Malay Archipelago, by influential biogeographer and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and immediately fell in love with the region, particularly with New Guinea and its amazing birds. One of my favourite bird families, the birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae), live only on New Guinea, a few nearby islands, and a small area of northern Australia. The birds-of-paradise form a family of songbirds comprised of 39 (or 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.
Female Queen Carola's parotia, Parotia carolae, compare notes on the males they are observing.Image: Tim Laman/National Geographic.
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 watch, to study, 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).
Enter the Birds-of-paradise Project. In 2003, wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman was on assignment for National Geographic to photograph the birds-of-paradise. He teamed up with Ed Scholes, a graduate student at the University of Kansas who was studying the Parotia birds-of-paradise for his Ph.D.
When Laman's National Geographic article was published in 2007, they had managed to photograph half of all birds-of-paradise species. Of course, this inspired Scholes and Laman to plan to document the remainder of these birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Geographic Expeditions Council, and Conservation International provided the funding necessary for the team to conduct additional expeditions into ever more remote parts of New Guinea.
By the time they photographed the last species eight years later, Scholes and Laman 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 to 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:
Reading on mobile? Click here to see more about the birds-of-paradise project
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, and 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 reveal the diverse evolutionary strategies 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.