Mystery Bird: King Bird of Paradise, Cicinnurus regius

Ha!

The French ornithologist Vieillot thought this feather to be a "regal curl", but the Bosavi people, using their poetic-onomatopoeic language, would name the bird after it's display call...

OK, at least this clue has nothing to do with lotharios or roofers or virgins (glad you got in before John today!) but I am baffled- is this one the bird's head or it's tail?

It looks like somthing similar to the decoration on a Booted racket-tail hummingbird but they are from Peru- I guess another member of the Trochilidae?

it looks like a snake ate it...

Hey Maggie, you seem to be along the right lines here however hummingbirds (the family Trochilidae) are only found in the Americas with about 40 species in the subtropical/tropical subfamily of hermit hummingbirds (Phaethornithinae) found from southern Mexico throughout Central and South America, and the "typical" hummingbirds comprising some 300 species in the subfamily Trochilinae ranging from Canada all the way down to Argentina.

You are looking for some similarities: subtropical/tropical habitats, sexual dimorphism, and iridescence, but as opposed to nectar (although about 10% of a hummer's diet consists of arthropods for proteins, minerals, fats), the bird family in question prefers fruits and insects depending upon location and interestingly, sexual behavior!

You're right, Maggie, that this looks like a hummingbird tail feather -- but the family Trochilidae is entirely western hemisphere -- there are no African hummingbirds.

As for what it actually is, I have no idea.

Paul/Maggie,

Here are a few photographic clues, however they are from plant species and not birds!

The first is Caesalpinia pulcherrima, a beautiful tropical shrub in the family Fabaceae that I used to grow when I worked in El Paso, and the next two are Strelitzia reginae and Strelitzia nicolai (Streliziaceae) both of which I grew indoors on a project in Washington DC (the garden I built featuring both of them in flower was used for the movie "Random Hearts")

Maggie, it's a bird that when discovered was described as an escape from the Garden of Eden. It's also a males tail feather and used in a magnificent display similar to the Hummingbird's.

You could "fill bins" with descriptions that have been written of this bird's spectacular courtship.

It's the King Bird of Paradise, and the curl is on the tip of its long tail streamers.

Wow, it seems that Papua New Guinea is replete with gorgeous birds from the long-tailed Paradise kingfishers to Bee-eaters to Pittas to Monarch Flycatchers to Flowerpeckers to Honeyeaters to the 35 species of Birds of Paradise, one of which this must be- but which one?!!

I think this is the tail wire (hard to find photos of them) found on the outside of the male Goldie's Bird of Paradise crimson display plumes, Paradisaea decora.

Hey Maggie,

A number of species in the family Paradisaeidae have tail wires: the Twelve-wired, the Lesser and Greater, Raggiana, the Red, King, Emperor, and Blue, etc. and I would agree that some of the photos of these birds do not show the tail wires especially well (you would probably do better consulting some of the beautiful lithographs by John Gould), however your Goldie's is actually confined to two islands, Fergusson and Normanby, which are about 1,000 km from Mount Bosavi where this photo was taken...

@Maggie, do your homework girl

Goldie Bird of Paradis

That is some kind of Bird of Paradise. I saw more of them on the BBC last few weeks, I recognized it immediatly!

btl,

1. Please note the tags on this blog: "Education" and "Teaching"

2. Please be reminded of Skitt's Law expressed as: ""any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself" or "the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."

you wrote "Goldie Bird of Paradis" but it is actually spelled "Goldie's Bird of Paradise"!

3. You have posted a photo of the wrong species!
The Red Bird of paradise (Paridiseae rubra) does indeed look similar but it has a brown breast and rather obviously yellow bill, whereas the Goldie's has a lavender-grey breast and a grey bill! The fact that it can only be found on Waigeo and Batanta islands about 2,000km the wrong side of where Goldie's is distributed and even further away from Mount Bosavi is moot...

Thanks David! Funny how his contribution was only after 10 comments had aleady been posted! Can you find me a good photo/drawing please?

@btl- obviously if you have your "lettuce" and "tomato" the wrong way round, what else is not quite right about you?

Maggie, I think if you take up the suggestion at #8 you will be on the regal trail!

According to her Facebook page, the photographer's first name is actually Ulla (no terminal 'h'), assuming we're talking about the BBC Expeditions photographer.

Since I don't do non-North American mystery bird's I can't speculate on this one. But I started googling images of birds of paradise and kind of freaked myself out. Let's hear it for sexual selection. Wahoo.

Hey John, that's my bad- I supplied the photo and information to Grrl and misspelled her name- she is one and the same: Ulla Lohmann (Discovery, NDR, Nat Geo, BBC, etc.)

This particular photo was published on one of the Guardian's Environment section "The Week in Wildlife" albums.

Thank you Adrian, I have it now- the King Bird of Paradise!

John- "I don't do non-North American mystery bird"- I have learned so much today, about hummingbirds and birds of paradise, just by exploring, following David's leads (his clues have me pulling my hair out though!), and picking up clues from others on this blog

David- I found a photo of the King but didn't see the tail wires- can you find me a good one of the King and also the Goldie's please?

Also, does cicinnurus mean curly as in your first clue: "regal curl"?

Maggie,

male King Bird of Paradise 1

male King Bird of Paradise 2

female King Bird of Paradise

A couple more from the same photographer, Robert (whose photos often get "stolen", posted on sites like Flickr, and never attributed- his albums are on pbase.com):

male 12-Wired Bird of Paradise

male Wilson's Bird of Paradise 1 (see David Attenborough's encounter with this amazing bird on BBC)

male Wilson's Bird of Paradise 2

Maggie (I think a couple more posts with some photos will appear before this once they clear immigration!)

the French ornithologist Vieillot thought this feather to be a "regal curl", but the Bosavi people, using their poetic-onomatopoeic language, would name it after it's display call

The bird's scientific name Cicinnurus regius is derived from the Latin cicinnus meaning "curl" and the Greek ούÏá½± meaning "tail"; regius is derived from rex meaning "king".

Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot described this genus in his 1816 Nouveau Dictionaire d'Histoire Naturelle.

This book, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Conduct and Communication) by Steven Feld, which has more on the bird imitations of the Kaluli people (from the larger group of Bosavi) who name their birds after the calls, is on my wish-list, however I am having a fight with Amazon over the debacle concerning Ray Comfort's bastardization of Darwin's Origin so I may be looking elsewhere to purchase it!

Maggie, I am having trouble inserting this link, but if you type it in you should be ok.
http://www.pbase.com/robert/image/68772347.
Good luck!

I guess I need to read the location a bit better. Or maybe just hope that my own stupid moments won't be seen -- there aren't any African Birds-of-Paradise either. Ooops.

LOL Paul! You are still correct, there are no African hummingbirds!

I guess the niche is adequately filled with species from the Nectariniidae: the Sunbirds (Africa and Asia) and Spiderhunters (only Asia).

@David #6

Here are a few photographic clues ... Caesalpinia pulcherrima ... Strelitzia reginae and Strelitzia nicolai

Don't know why I missed that? These are Bird of Paradise plant species!

Absolutely correct Maggie- Caesalpinia pulcherrima is know as the "Red Bird of Paradise" or "Mexican Bird of Paradise", and Strelitzia reginae is know simply as "Bird of Paradise" with S. nicolai, the "Giant Bird of Paradise"... in addition, several species in the genus Heliconia are often referred to as "False Bird's of Paradise", many of which I photographed when I was last in the Oriente of Ecuador.

@psweet: What's Africa got to do with the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea?

I didn't see many types of bird on my trip to PNG - only the "megapode" (and the ubiquitous sparrow and some domesticated chickens). The natives offered to get me some megapode eggs for breakfast if I would give them some beer - but they collect the eggs in a silly way which often leads to them (the natives) being buried alive, so I didn't encourage eating the bird eggs.

I've never seen any of the elusive and endangered birds of paradise - only feathers in a headdress here and there.

MadScientist -- Africa has zero to do with New Guinea, which was sort of my point. My first post (way back at #5) assumed that the bird was African. I skimmed the location, saw that the shot was taken in an old volcano, and assumed that this was another one of the African birds. Quite a few of them were photographed in one of the old African volcanoes.

@MadScientist #28

What's Africa got to do with the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea?

Other than the fact that he had already acknowledged the faux-pas at #24, how about the process of literary transfer from European nations to their colonies in the 20th century where many of the literary change agents that arrived in PNG had flown there directly from decolonizing East and West Africa, the respective Literature Bureaux very closely aligned? (Evelyn Ellerman, 1995 "The Literature Bureau: African Influence in Papua New Guinea," Research in African Literatures, 26.4:206-215)...

Or we have the plant-bird connection alluded to in earlier posts with the beautiful Strelitzia reginae, a native of South Africa and not the tropical locations usually associated with it, being named of course after the Birds of Paradise endemic to PNG...

And then from a puely avian perspective, we have the "elephant bird" connection as presented by Richard Dawkins in his discussion on Gondwana, moas, and plate tectonics in The Ancestor's Tale where the ancient bird family of the ratites included the rheas of South America, the emus of Australia, the cassowaries of New Guinea and Australia, the kiwis of New Zealand, and the African ostrich, all of which are more closely related to each other than to other birds...

so it would seem that Africa does indeed have quite a lot to do with New Guinea

Hey Paul, unfortunately the timing is a little off, but I had already posted a comment in retort to him that does in fact demonstrate a literary, botanical, and avian connection between Africa and PNG- once it gets through "immigration", all will become clear!

(Grrl, that was impressive! I didn't find the "secondary screening" invasive at all- if only everyone was subjected to it or nobody profiled, then the flow of information would not have that "Tardis" anomaly!)