ever come with one, but would tie it by the leg to a
stick, and put it in their house till they caught another.
The poor creature would make violent efforts to escape,
would get among the ashes, or hang suspended by the leg
till the limb was swollen and half-putrefied, and sometimes
die of starvation and worry. One had its beautiful head all
defiled by pitch from a dammar torch; another had been
so long dead that its stomach was turning green. Luckily,
however, the skin and plumage of these birds is so firm
and strong, that they bear washing and cleaning better
than almost any other sort; and I was generally able to
clean them so well that they did not perceptibly differ
from those I had shot myself.
Some few were brought me the same day they were
caught, and I had an opportunity of examining them in
all their beauty and vivacity. As soon as I found they
were generally brought alive, I set one of my men to
make a large bamboo cage with troughs for food and
water, hoping to be able to keep some of them. I got
the natives to bring me branches of a fruit they were
very fond of, and I was pleased to find they ate it
greedily, and would also take any number of live grasshoppers
I gave them, stripping off the legs and wings, and
then swallowing them. They drank plenty of water, and
were in constant motion, jumping about the cage from
perch to perch, clinging on the top and sides, and rarely
resting a moment the first day till nightfall. The second
day they were always less active* although they would
eat as freely as before; and on the morning of the third
day they were almost always found dead at the bottom
of the cage, without any apparent cause. Some of them
ate boiled rice as well as fruit and insects; but after
trying many in succession, not one out of ten lived more
than three days. The second or third day they would be
dull, and in several cases they were seized with convulsions,
and fell off the perch, dying a few hours afterwards.
I tried immature as well as full-plumaged birds,
but with no better success, and at length gave it up as a
hopeless task, and confined my attention to preserving
specimens in as good a condition as possible.
The Bed Birds of Paradise are not shot with blunt arrows,
as in the Aru Islands and some parts of Hew Guinea, but
are snared in a very ingenious manner. A large climbing
Arum bears a red reticulated fruit, of which the birds are
very fond. The hunters fasten this fruit on a stout forked
stick, and provide themselves with a fine but strong cord.
They then seek out some tree in the forest on which these
birds are accustomed to perch, and climbing up it fasten
the stick to a branch and arrange the cord in a noose so
ingeniously, that when the bird comes to eat the fruit its
legs are caught, and by pulling the end of the cord, which
hangs down to the ground, it comes free from the branch