Attenborough's Paradise Birds

SQUAWKING

For 500 years, these birds have been

surrounded by myth and glamour.

And I've got to confess that I've been fascinated by them

for most of my life.

This is just one member of a hugely varied family

that, to my mind, includes the most spectacular

and beautiful birds on Earth.

The birds of paradise.

And what's more,

they throw light on some of the great mysteries of evolution.

Why have the birds of paradise become the most diverse, bizarre

and beautiful of all bird families?

Why have they developed the most extravagant plumes

and adornments of any group of living things on Earth,

so that sometimes, they almost cease to look like birds at all?

And why is it that this extraordinary family

is largely restricted

to one jungle-covered island in the Pacific?

TRILLING

Explorers and scientists

have been puzzling over these questions for 500 years.

Even today, by using the latest filming techniques,

we are making new discoveries about their behaviour.

This surely is one of the most spectacular sights

anyone could see in the natural world.

The mystery of the birds of paradise

began back in the 16th century.

In 1522, a ship returning to Europe

from exploring the mysterious islands of the Far East

brought with it, amongst other marvels,

three extraordinary skins.

They were very like this one.

You can see it's a bird - there's its beak, and its head.

And here are these long, feathery plumes.

But it has no wings...

and no feet.

The explorers had been told that

that was because these birds lived in paradise.

The ship concerned was one of five

that had set out in 1519

to sail around the world for the very first time,

under the command of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan.

They endured catastrophic tropical storms and shipwrecks.

Magellan himself was killed in a tribal war in the Philippines.

But after three gruelling years,

the Victoria, the sole surviving ship, arrived back in Spain.

It was loaded with wonders and treasures,

including those first specimens of birds of paradise.

Magellan had been presented with these skins by a king

in the Spice Islands - the Moluccas, as we call them today -

in eastern Indonesia.

When Magellan's men asked why they had no wings or no feet,

the people had a problem,

because they themselves had never seen the birds alive.

They had been traded to the islands

from islands even farther to the east.

So they made up an answer.

They said, "Well, it's because the birds float high in the sky,

"among the clouds, feeding on dew,

"and human beings only see them when they die and fall to the earth."

So the first descriptions of these "birds of the gods"

were far from first-hand.

Yet they were accepted as fact by Europeans.

This was one of the very first paintings of a bird of paradise,

and it appears in the margin of a book of prayers

written in 1540,

to show the devout the sort of creatures

they might expect to see when they got to paradise.

But it wasn't only the pious who were interested in the discovery.

So were naturalists.

But their understanding of the birds was similarly clouded by mythology.

This is the first volume in a great encyclopaedia of natural history

published in 1599 by an Italian called Aldrovandus.

And it's full of remarkably accurate pictures and descriptions.

There's a toucan, for example.

And here is a hornbill.

But turn another couple of pages...

..and a bird of paradise, without legs,

floating in the skies. No wings.

And here it is drinking dew from the clouds.

Aldrovandus was so respected that this view of the habits

of birds of paradise persisted well into the 17th century.

It's hardly surprising that these pictures are wildly inaccurate,

bearing in mind that they were drawn from those flattened skins.

After all, no-one in Europe had ever seen wings or legs

attached to these astonishing plumes.

So it was not unreasonable for Europeans,

who still believed in dragons and mermaids,

to accept that these birds lived in paradise.

But still no-one knew where the skins actually came from.

In fact, the birds come from New Guinea.

It's 1,000 miles long and lies just north of Australia.

And there, of course, the people knew perfectly well

the truth about the birds.

They hunted them for the sake of their plumes,

which they used as currency and in many of their important ceremonials.

My first opportunity to see these wonderful birds

came when I went to New Guinea back in 1957.

We saw a wide, fertile valley ringed with mountains.

This was our destination - the valley of the Wahgi River.

Within a few minutes of landing, I saw coming towards me

through the tall grass a party of tribesmen

wearing magnificent feather headdresses.

We filmed a celebration called a Sing-sing,

during which tribal people,

wearing spectacular headdresses of birds-of-paradise plumes,

gather together to dance and chant.

And I took these photographs.

They displayed them during their dances,

showing how wealthy each of the men were

by having these enormous headdresses.

That's Princess Stephanie's black tail feathers.

These are King of Saxony's feathers from the top of the head.

These are the red plumes of Count Raggi's bird of paradise,

and these the yellow ones of the Lesser.

When they came to have marriages,

a party going to collect a bride would have to take a gift

to the bride's parents of birds-of-paradise plumes.

And they arrange them on these great banners.

There's a front view of that with nearly two dozen sets

of bird-of-paradise plumes all around the side of the banner.

And down the middle there, gold-lipped pearl shells.

For thousands of years, the plumes have been traded

from this part of New Guinea right across Indonesia,

up into South-East Asia and beyond.

In Europe 400 years ago, many aristocratic families

possessed cabinets of curiosities

in which they displayed their collections of natural wonders,

and specimens of birds of paradise were amongst the most precious.

Their splendour even caught the eye of British royalty.

The young Scottish prince who was going to become Charles I of England

had his portrait painted with his furry hat on the table beside him,

and in it, his most treasured possession -

the plumes of birds of paradise.

Naturalists, seeking to curry favour with the aristocracy

and get financial backing for their expeditions,

promised to name any new species they discovered after their patrons,

and indeed they did so.

This is Queen Carola's bird of paradise,

with plumes on the top of his head.

This one was named after an Italian count,

Count Raggi's bird of paradise.

This one was named after Queen Victoria.

And this one is Prince Rudolf's bird of paradise,

though it's more often known these days as the blue bird of paradise.

And here is Princess Stephanie's bird of paradise,

with a great, long, glossy black plume.

Not all were named after royalty.

Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, fired with republican zeal,

named this one Diphyllodes Respublica,

the Republican or People's bird of paradise.

But the popular version of the name didn't catch on,

and these days we call it Wilson's Bird.

Unlike the showy males,

the female birds-of-paradise are drab and brown in colour.

All look very similar, so you can well believe that they are related.

It's just the males with their extravagant decorations

that make the individual species look so different.

But even as late as the 19th century, no European

had seen anything of these birds except their dried skins.

And people wondered what the living birds must look like.

Errol Fuller, a collector who owns specimens

of 37 of the 39 known species of birds of paradise,

also paints them, and understands the difficulties involved.

The early painters of birds couldn't go and see these things in the wild,

and they couldn't see them in captivity,

so they were presented with something like this.

A dried, flattened skin that had been brought back from New Guinea,

and this was all they had to go on to make their painting.

This is a Black Sicklebill bird of paradise.

And the problem they had were things like this.

What on earth are these?

They look at first sight like wings. But they're not wings.

The wings are down here. They're just ornamental plumes,

and there are more ornamental plumes down here.

So, what did the bird do with these in life?

This is a mid-19th-century artist's answer,

and it's wildly inaccurate.

The Sicklebill actually displays like this.

It takes him a little time to work up to his full display posture.

There!

He lifts up those feathery tufts on his shoulders,

and holds them around his head so that he hardly looks like a bird.

And he repeats the performance on the same display post

up to five times every morning.

It wasn't until 300 years after Europeans saw the first skins

that anyone actually saw a bird of paradise displaying in the wild.

And the person who did so was the British explorer

Alfred Russel Wallace who, along with Darwin,

first proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Alfred Russel Wallace was a great naturalist and scientist,

but he was not a wealthy man.

He earned his living by going to the tropics and collecting insects

and birds, and sending them back for sale to wealthy collectors

and to museums.

And he was obsessed with birds of paradise.

In 1854, he set off for New Guinea.

He became the first European ever to see birds of paradise display.

Here is his description of that sight.