One of the striking things about the New Guinea
footage that we see is that it’s just green, except for the birds, which pop.
So how is that
realized in your time in the forest?
The very second species of Bird-of-Paradise I saw was
Magnificent Bird-of-Paradise.
And I can remember I was sitting on the edge of the court,
it was muddy and brown and green all around and I’m hiding.
Finally the male came down and he landed on the court about
six or seven feet away from where I was sitting.
That moment when he just showed up there
and had this incredible yellow on the back of his neck
and yellow-orange on his wings, and he turned and he
caught the light and I saw this
iridescent blue wires curling behind his tail,
and it was,
that's it,
that's what this bird is meant to do, is to show those colors.
The thing that’s most
impressive to me about color in Birds-of-Paradise is
not just that they're colorful
but it's really about the wide
variety of combinations of color and the different types of color.
They have every shade of brown.
You have off-whites and then you have
stark, stark bright-white.
You have all the different kinds of
pigmented color, the
yellows and reds and oranges.
And then you have the whole range of structural colors from
the blues to the
more traditional greens and then all the iridescent blues and greens,
and then iridescent
reds and oranges as well.
When you step back and look at them all, you see not just a rainbow of colors
among the whole family, but that they’re used in such different ways; whether it's
from the colors of feathers on the sides of the body
to the colors inside of the mouth or even the skin on top of the head.
It's just something that you don't see
quite as diverse in any other set of birds.
Most people know, that when you’re walking out
through a forest and
you have a closed canopy of leaves, that it’s pretty dark.
And so a lot of the species that display on the ground
or low in the forest, they're looking for a natural light gap that existed before
they started displaying there.
A tree fell nearby, got a nice opening,
and then typically what they would do is then choose a display site
and then open it up even more by pruning leaves, inviting more light in and making the
colors that they do have, show up better to the female.
Looking at a lot of Birds-of-Paradise,
a handful really stand out in that it's the color that you see first as opposed
to the shape.
In Astrapia, it really is
more about the shape. You're seeing the…
this long-tail bird that looks mostly black, and that's because it's got this set of
really incredible colors but they’re iridescent colors and unless you're in the right place
you don't see them as color.
So that's not one that stands out as "Oh, there’s this incredibly colorful bird
up in the tree."
Whereas the Paradisaeas
or the King Bird-of-Paradise
and its relatives like the Magnificent Bird-of-Paradise and Wilson's,
your first visual impression of them when you see them is color.
Wow, that’s red or look at that
blue on the head or that yellow on the neck. Or the
Twelve-wired Bird-of-Paradise, you know, it’s not the wires that you see first; it’s the
incredible yellow spot that's
up on top of a pole. Even when it’s just this tiny little thing that you’re looking at from a
boat in the middle of a river, and there’s this sea of green and there’s this one little branch
sticking up out of the forest and on top of it is something artificially
yellow that’s stuck on there. And you put your binoculars on and you realize that’s a bird,
that’s a male Twelve-wired Bird-of-Paradise.
It’s only when you look at them up close that you see that there’s other things going on.
There’s other subtle colors. Oh, look, he’s also got wires,
he's using that in the behavior.
But there's no doubt that, that color stands out in the forest.
And that's certainly
the purpose of it, that females are attracted to that color, as
something that can be seen from any perspective,
from both close-up and quite far.
Whereas lots of these other ornaments that have
iridescent colors or unusual shapes to them,
they don't work from far away, they’re really meant to work only up-close.
What is iridescent? What does that mean compared to
regular?
Iridescent colors is colors that
aren't always the same. Meaning you look at it from one perspective and it might
look like one color and it could be intense and bright, and then you look at it
shifted just a little bit from another perspective
and now it’s either a different color or perhaps it's no color at all.
It just looks black.
And so it's the property of,
of having color that's produced by the structure
inside the feather itself. It's not just color inherent in it,
it’s not just pigments in there,
and that changes depending on how you’re looking at it.
Is black always no color or is black sometimes a precision tuned instrument?
In many Birds-of-Paradise, black is clearly
as much of a purposeful
object that's been selected for to be something
as any color is. I think that's
most clear in the species that aren’t just black
but they're velvet black
in that all the light goes in and almost nothing comes back out.
Rarely do you see this
ultra-black without some other color
that's being accentuated on top of it. And I like to think of this as the guy
in the jewelry store who’s going to show you the diamond and he pulls out this
nice black piece of velvet cloth to lay the jewels on because it makes them
look that much more extraordinary.
And often in Birds-of-Paradise,
you'll have this real intense patch
of iridescent feathers surrounded by that velvet black.
And the contrast between the two couldn't be any more extreme.
That's really cool.