Animal and Zoo Magazine 1936-41. Part 3. Margaret Shaw interviewed F. Shaw Mayer on collecting birds-of-paradise in New Guinea

My eye was drawn to an article in the first issue because it described Fergusson, an island in the d’Entrecasteux group north west of New Guinea which we visited in 2014.

MARGARET SHAW worked on the magazine and in this, her first article, she interviewed Frederick Shaw Mayer (1889-1989), the Australlian collector, ornithologist and aviculturist

who has famous for his work with birds-of-paradise. Mayer supplied zoos and rich private

collectors in Britain with live birds and museum with dead ones (failures of the former making specimens for the latter) and he had arrived in London in 1936 with a Grey-breasted, now known as Goldie’s, Bird-of-Paradise (Paradisaea decora). Then known only from a skin collected in 1882 by Andrew Goldie, Mayer spent four months waiting for accessible trees to bear fruit on which these birds feed before getting his local assistants to set snares. The birds-of-paradise have been and still are killed for ceremonial dress, and the natives of Fergusson, Mayer reported, killed them with spears or set hand-pulled snares.

Mayer based himself at the village of Taibutu (later called Saibutu, on the southern slope of Mount Maybole) at a height of 1000 feet. The first adult male caught and brought to him was killed by a snake (its skin is in the Natural History Museum). It was the only other adult male caught that he brought to London.

He also collected the Curl-crested Manucode, Manucodia comrii (then called Comrie’s Manucode), the bird we saw and heard while walking back to the village from the hot springs during our morning in the lowlands of Fergusson.

Goldie's Bird-of-Paradise
Found only on Fergusson and Normanby
islands

From Fergusson, Mayer made further collections in the mountains of Papua New Guinea (including the Blue Bird-of-Paradise, Paradisaea rudolphi, Princess Stephanie’s Astrapia, Astrapia stephaniae), and one of the sicklebills. He travelled to London with his specimens by porter to the coast and then by ship. He left New Guinea with with over 70 live birds and he arrived in London with the same number. He also had specimens of birds and mammals for the British Museum. An attack of malaria left him so weak that he had to cable the Zoo for a keeper to be sent out to Port Said to help him care for the birds on the rest of the journey.

But then he was, as Margaret Shaw reported, off again.

Indeed, the South China Morning Post of 26 March 1937 had an article on Mayer. He and another collection of birds destined for London and Paignton zoos were occupying two rooms and verandahs at the Great Eastern Hotel in Hong Kong awaiting passage on P&O’s Soudan. This time he had been in New Guinea for six months and it was his ninth collecting trip there. G.A.C. Herklots was invited to see the birds while they were at the hotel.

Approaching Fergusson in 2014. The low clouds are steam from the
hot springs