In the days when colour printing was extremely expensive, the Avicultural Society had special appeals for funds to support the appearance in Avicultural Magazine of the occasional colour plate. A well-known bird artist was then commissioned. Although the whole run of the Society’s magazines can be found online, the plates rarely see the light of day. Therefore I decided to show one, now and again, on this site. This is the 4th in the series.
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This plate illustrates an article by the artist, George Morrison Reid Henry (1891-1983). He published and signed his work ‘G.M. Henry’. One of eleven children, his father was manager of tea estates in what was then Ceylon. He was educated at home by his older sisters. After working as a laboratory assistant he was taken on as a draughtsman by the Colombo Museum. He worked his way up and in 1913 was appointed to a new post of Assistant in Systematic Entomology. He stayed in in that post until he retired in 1946. His son, David Morrison Reid Henry (1919-1977) was also a bird painter and his work is shown in the first of this series.
As well as papers on insects, he wrote and illustrated A Guide to the Birds of Ceylon (Oxford University Press) which was first published 1955.
Henry wrote the article for Avicultural Magazine from Constantine, five miles from Falmouth in Cornwall. He called the bird the Ceylon Lorikeet (Loriculus beryllinus) and preferred the word ‘lorikeet’ to ‘hanging parrot’ on the grounds that other unrelated parrots sleep suspended from small twigs. However, Hanging Parrot was then and still is the term used for members of the genus Loriculus. This is a species we have seen in the wild. It is endemic to Sri Lanka.
George Morrison Reid Henry died on 30 June 1983 in Worthing, West Sussex.
Avicultural Magazine 68, 1962
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