File:The bird, its form and function (1906) (14732642676).jpg

Identifier: birditsformfunct07beeb (find matches)
Title: The bird, its form and function
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Beebe, William, 1877-1962
Subjects: Birds Birds
Publisher: New York : Henry Holt
Contributing Library: Internet Archive
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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Text Appearing Before Image:
Fig. 211.—Six-shafted Bird of Paradise (a mounted bird). (From a photo-graph provided by the American Museum of Natural History.) Head decorations reach the acme of strangeness inthe King of Saxonys Bird of Paradise. The bird itselfis sombre-hued and small, about the size of our robin,with nothing unusual about its appearance, except forthe two streamers springing from opposite sides of the 270 The Bird head. They are twice (or more) the length of the body,and, far from being feather-like, they are best describedas a series of thirty or forty tiny flags of blue enamel,each separate, each hanging pendent from the mainshaft (Fig. 212). It would seem as if Nature herselfcould go no farther in unusual decoration than this.
Text Appearing After Image:
Fig. 212. —King of Saxony Bird of Paradise. (From a photograph providedby the American Museum of Natural History.) In the Double-crested Pigeon of Australia the coreor fleshy covering of the beak is completely feathered;while some of the birds known as plantain-eaters arefeathered to the very tip of the short beak with plumesof delicate green, tipped with white. The extreme offeathering is shown by the Cock-of-the-Rock, in which Heads and Necks 271 the whole beak, in fact every part of the head except theeyes, is buried in a maze of soft, orange plumes. As the antithesis to this condition, we find manybirds which have the head partly or entirely bare offeathers, such as the vultures and some of the waders. In the former group this lack of feathers is doubtless

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