{"id":5295,"date":"2023-12-08T09:05:33","date_gmt":"2023-12-08T13:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-majesty-and-mystery-of-the-birds-of-paradise-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-12-08T09:05:33","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T13:05:33","slug":"the-majesty-and-mystery-of-the-birds-of-paradise-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-majesty-and-mystery-of-the-birds-of-paradise-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Majesty and Mystery of the Birds-of-Paradise \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cTo go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass<\/em> and the Late Quartets<\/em>, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,\u201d the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This is the great astonishment: that we come from a lineage of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, that however precisely we may trace the causality of the forces and phenomena leading to the improbable fact of us, still the most powerful and enchanting experiences of our lives \u2014 those things that didn\u2019t have to exist: music, beauty, love \u2014 are beyond the reach of why<\/em>. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is the universe? To shape God,\u201d wrote Octavia Butler, who favored science over religion<\/a>. \u201cWhy is God? To shape the universe.\u201d <\/p>\n

Perhaps God is just the name we give the wonders beyond why<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Twelve-wired bird-of-paradise (Seleucidis melanoleuca<\/em>). Photograph: Tim Laman. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Among this world\u2019s most staggering whyless wonders are the birds-of-paradise, native to the island of New Guinea \u2014 strange shamans of transformation with plumage so beautiful and behavior so baffling, so far beyond the evolutionary demands of sexual selection, that no causal account of their speciation seems adequate. And yet here they are \u2014 here is beauty that didn\u2019t have to exist, here is nature turned supranatural, here is wonder beyond why<\/em>. <\/p>\n

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Birds-of-paradise (Epimachus Ellioti<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Close kin of the crow and cousins of the bowerbird \u2014 itself a living astonishment<\/a> \u2014 the birds-of-paradise puzzled Darwin. He struggled to understand the need for such ostentatious displays of beauty in the context of evolutionary theory \u2014 feathers so long and lavish that they constrict flight, making the birds vastly more vulnerable to predators; courtship dances so extraordinary and effortful that mate selection, so much simpler and safer in all other bird species, becomes not the blind mechanism of gene propagation but a spectacle of wonder.<\/p>\n

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Wilson\u2019s bird-of-paradise (Cicinnnurus respublica<\/em>). Photograph: Tim Laman. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Darwin was desperately searching for an explanation in the laboratory of the mind, Alfred Russell Wallace<\/a> chose the observatory of the world and set out to see these living marvels with his own eyes. <\/p>\n

Born before photography, having only written accounts and dead specimens to work with, he must have intuited that the mystery of the birds-of-paradise was the mystery of life itself \u2014 a mystery shaped by the complexity of context and the urgency of connection, best apprehended by living observation. <\/p>\n

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Birds-of-paradise (Dephyllodes Chrysoptera<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Five years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species<\/em>, fomented by the joint paper on natural selection he had written with Wallace, the thirty-one-year-old Wallace undertook the first of several voyages searching for the birds-of-paradise. In the five years he spent living in and around New Guinea, he became the first European to observe these strange and wondrous creatures in their native habitat, to see them dance and hear them sing. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems as if Nature had taken precautions that these her choicest treasures should not be made too common, and thus be undervalued,\u201d he rued after managing to obtain only five specimens in all his travels. He returned thinking them \u201cthe most wonderful productions of Nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recounting his voyages in the 1869 book The Malay Archipelago<\/em>, which he dedicated to Darwin, Wallace exulted: <\/p>\n

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[Their] exquisite beauty of form and colour and strange developments of plumage are calculated to excite the wonder and admiration of the most civilized and the most intellectual of mankind, and to furnish inexhaustible materials for study to the naturalist, and for speculation to the philosopher.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Decora<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But while his book sparked an intellectual interest in the birds-of-paradise, words failed to convey the feeling-tone of wonder \u2014 this most enchanted passageway between eye and brain, between sight and spirit. It was the 1888 completion of the long-labored Birds of New Guinea<\/em> by John Gould \u2014 whose wife Elizabeth had catapulted him into fame with her stunning drawings of the birds of the Himalayas<\/a> half a century earlier \u2014 that achieved this. <\/p>\n

By the time the book was published, both John and Elizabeth were dead. But the consummate illustrations in it became the standard lithographs reproduced in countless subsequent volumes on the birds-of-paradise. <\/p>\n

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Birds-of-paradise (Seleucides Negricans<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Sanguinea<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Papuana<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Raggiana<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Birds-of-paradise (Parotia Lawesi<\/em>) by John Gould. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, illustration could only capture the static beauty of the birds \u2014 not the dynamic astonishment of their behavior: their courtship dances, their strange songs, their flash transformation from ordinary bird to extraordinary feathered deity. It took more than a century for the young science of photography to catalyze the art of moving images and give us a way of conveying wonder across space and time. <\/p>\n