Last week I said I’d bring you another mystery bird at some point. Well, that point is now, and I’ve got a bird with one mouthful of a name, Rothschild’s Lobe-billed Bird-of-Paradise (Loborhamphus nobilis?)
Much like our pretty pigeon from last week, only two examples of this species(?) were ever found, but it is a truly bizarre bird that is part of a much grander mystery in the ornithological world.
As the name suggests, it is a Bird-of-Paradise, and hails from the island of New Guinea. But here’s the thing, no-one has ever seen a living one. So how did we even find it? Well, some 100+ years ago, there was a little thing called the feather trade. This was a business that sent people out to remote parts of the world to hunt down pretty birds, shoot them, pluck them, and send their feathers back to society. At the time, the ladies of high fashion had a powerful hankering for fancy hats, and nothing says fancy hat like bird feathers.
You really hadn’t made it in society unless you had a bird on your head. Plume traders would buy birds from indigenous trappers and send their findings back to the milliners of London and Paris. Millions of birds were slaughtered through this trade with many species nearly pushed to extinction. But through this process a number of mysterious birds were discovered, including our one. In 1901, Dutch trader, Renesse van Duivenbode, who was familiar with the common species of Birds-of-Paradise, noticed he had something rare on his hands, so he sold it to Walter Rothschild.
Now Walter Rothschild was probably the greatest collector of dead things who ever lived. Born into the prominent Rothschild banking family, young Walter was always more interested in nature. He became obsessed with collecting the weird and wonderful, and over 50 years managed to amass something like 300,000 birds, 200,000 birds’ eggs and over 2,000,000 butterflies. The guy just liked collected dead things, don’t judge.
He was something of a gentleman naturalist, and in 1901, when this rare bird came across his desk, he thought, well, if ever there was a bird that needed my name attached to it, this is it. So he promptly wrote up a description and pinned his name to this bird and its lobed bill. But as the years went by and no new specimens were found people began to wonder what its deal was. Was it rare, extinct, a strange one-off hybrid? Stranger still, there were about 20 other so-called unique species of Bird-of-Paradise that had a similar story: only one or two specimens were ever found and then no more. So, what gives?
Well, that’s where ornithologist rock star, Erwin Stresemann, comes into the story (yes, there are ornithology rock stars, what of it?). But sadly, this is also the place where I leave you hanging. If you would like to know what became of Rothschild’s strange bird and all its equally strange relatives, then pop over to read Part II of our story on the Birds-of-Paradise: When Does A Bird Come From Paradise?
25/10/2020
Bird of the Week 