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

Curl-Crested Manucode: Seen and Heard

Curl-crested Manucode by William Matthew Hart
(1830-1908) for John Gould's Birds of New Guinea
(National Library of Australia)

Saturday 8 February this year saw us on Fergusson Island, one of the D’Entrecasteaux group, to the north-east of the eastern end of Papaua New Guinea. A morning walk had taken us from the point the zodiacs could land to the impressive hot springs. On the way back, a black crow-like bird landed in the top of a tree. The binoculars showed it had what can only be described as an unfortunate hair style. No sooner were we looking at it when it threw its head back, spread its feathers without raising its wings and made an amazing sound. It was a Curl-crested Manucode, a bird-of-paradise endemic to the D’Entrecasteaux and Trobriand Islands. Another, possibly a female, joined it in the same tree. Soon, other males appeared in trees on either side but some distance from the gravel track, each giving their display the full works. They were too far away for me to do anything with the camera I was carrying. However, I was delighted to find that the Curl-crested Manucode is very well shown, along with its song, in the recently completed Birds-of-Paradise Project by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Landing on Fergusson Island. Noble Caledonia Caledonian Sky Expedition Team Photograph

The Cornell video shows why the manucodes are famous for the length of their trachaea with loops and curls that travel under the skin the length of the bird several times. The trachea of the Trumpet Manucode, Manucodia keraudrenii, is the most impressive as the following diagrams from Mary Clench’s (1978) paper show:

Other birds that have loud or resonant calls have an elongated trachea and Darren Naish has an excellent blog post (with references to earlier research).

Unfortunately, the Cornell project’s video on this bird includes the tracheal elongation but makes no mention of the effect of a long trachea on respiratory physiology, nor draws attention to what is so special about respiration in birds    compared to mammals. A long trachea means more dead space. The tidal volume—the volume of gas inspired or expired per inhalation—must be greater than in a bird with a short trachea. No matter how efficient the avian lung is at exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide—and it is really efficient—the volume of air inhaled first into the posterior air sacs before passing through the lungs must be greater. Only birds, with their extensive system of air sacs, can afford such a long trachea (giraffes would be the nearest mammalian equivalent—to see how they do it) since only they can generate such a large tidal volume. But a long trachea must bear a metabolic cost since the fuel to power the muscles that generate the large tidal volume must be supplied continuously. In this respect it is interesting to note that Clench concluded that the increasing complexity of the tracheal loops occurs as the males age (in females the trachea stays relatively simple). So does a more successful male produce a sound more enticing to the female and thus signal the fact that it can afford to invest in a longer trachea, and/or to other males that if you come near me, I am older, fitter and can see you off? In either case the signal would be an ‘honest’ signal of the quality of the male.

Having watched the manucodes plus the other birds for half an hour or so we walked back to the landing where a zodiac soon has us back for what we thought was a well-deserved lunch.

Hot springs, Fergusson Island. Noble Caledonia Caledonian Sky Expedition Team Photograph

----------------------

Clench, M.H. 1978. Tracheal elongation in birds-of-paradise. Condor 80 423-430