In the 1820s, when the Frenchman René P Lesson finally witnessed a bird of paradise flying in the canopies of a coastal forest in Western New Guinea, he likened the experience in his ensuing book to seeing "a meteor whose body, cutting through the air, leaves a long trail of light."¹³ This sensational news aroused great attention among many European naturalists and the birds of South­east Asia quickly became a competitive subject of zoological research. As Rick De Vos has pointed out, the representations of birds of paradise as "ethereal, exotic, beautiful, and seductive" charmed Europe­ans as they fed their Romantic tropical fantasies.¹⁴

Throughout the nineteenth century, naturalists continued to travel to colonial Indonesia and New Guinea to observe, collect, and ship home birds of paradise. In the imperial centers of Europe, the effect of these growing collections was both scientific and cultural. Indeed, bird collections in Europe and the United Scates grew rapidly, increasing the demand for previously unseen species to be collected and imported. In the world of popular culture, Victorians fancied their private houses outfitted with glass vitrines of exotic animals—above all, swank and colorful birds from the tropics. Additionally, a boom in women's bird-hat fashion significantly increased the demand for plumage from Southeast Asia. European milliners soon preferred bird of paradise skins that had been prepared with arsenic by profes­sional collectors to the skins on offer from local hunters. With such demand, the "plume boom" led imported European firearms to replace bows and arrows in the tropical forest. As demand grew, plume trade businesses operated by Dutch merchants began to dominate the market in the late nineteenth century, leading to increasing numbers of exports.
In Southeast Asia, the colonial history of bird collect­ing thus exemplifies one of the contemporary para­doxes of Nature appreciation: that the adoration of tropical wildlife also led to its destruction in vast and rapid numbers while frequently redirecting and overwriting the many local histories of interspecies relationships.¹⁵ Until various conservation policies were enforced in the 1920s, vast numbers of birds were slaughtered each year, with annual estimates of killed and extracted birds of paradise ranging between thirty to eighty thousand in the late nine­ teenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁶ The male plumes which had evolved over countless generations to entice females to mate, and thus to ensure the birds' transgenerational existence, had led to their demise.

Quite Unlike Anything Yet Known

I have a new Bird of Paradise! of a new genus!! quile unlike anything yet known, very curious and very handsome!!! When I can get a couple of pairs, I will send them overland, to see what a new Bird of Paradise will really fetch. I expect £25 each!

-A. R Wallace, letter to Samuel Stevens ¹⁷


While traveling among the Aru and Molucca Islands, Wallace obtained skins of five of the now scientifically identified forty-two bird of paradise subspecies. His role as a collector is preserved in the scientific name Semioptera wallacii, or Standardwing Bird-of­-Paradise, endemic to the Indonesian "spice islands." The adult males are brown-and-green breasted with two long-white feathers extending separately from the top of each wing. These individuals are most active in the early dawn hours when they fly from branch to branch, crowing and prancing in the canopies for a willing female mate. For evolutionary biologists, the natural and sexual selection traits of highly individualized island species like the Semiop­tera wallacii are a beloved object of study. Almost every natural history museum in the world proudly exhibits birds of paradise for their most exuberant and diverse adaptation.
   
During one of our many field visits to Indonesia, we had the rare opportunity to crouch quietly under the forest canopy near Weda on Halmahera, North Maluku province, together with George Beccaloni, the director of the Wallace Correspondence Project. As curators, after seeing countless dead skins in museum collections, the contrast of finally seeing and experiencing these birds alive, performing their erotic forest rituals on their own terms, in their own habitat, was overwhelming. For amateur observers like us, these small, delicate birds are a little difficult to make out among the shadowy foliage and branches, but their desirous calls resound in the jungle. The incredible suspense of waiting to spot a live Stand­ardwing in the slowly brightening forest is a magical thing, which at one point had both of us crawling up a crooked trunk, cheeks against bark, hearts beating rapidly and eyes eager to witness the emerald flickers.¹⁸ The humbling privilege of witnessing the birds that morning in the forest transformed our knowledge about them.
   
Wallace obtained the first specimens of the emerald species in October 1858, and he immediately wrote a letter to Samuel Stevens, his London-based agent, relaying the birds' beauty and noting his expectations for its profitable sale in Europe:

I believe I have already the finest and most wonderful bird in the island. I had a good mind to keep it a secret, but I cannot resist telling you. I have a new Bird of Paradise! of a new genus!! quite unlike anything yet known, very curious and very handsome!!! When I can get a couple of pairs, I will send them overland, to see what a new Bird of Paradise will really fetch. I expect £25 each! Had I seen the bird in Ternate, I should never have believed it came from here. so far our of the hitherto supposed region of the Paradiseidæ. I consider it the greatest discovery I have yet made; and it gives me hopes of getting other species in Gilolo and Ceram. [ ... ] [Bacan] also differs from all the other Moluccas in its geological formation, containing iron, coal, copper, and gold, with a glorious forest vegetation and fine large mountain streams: it is a continent in miniature. The Dutch are working the coals; and there is a good road to the mines, which gives one easy access to the interior forests.¹⁹

Wallace was instrumental in supplying ornitholo­gists and taxidermists with the bird skins that he shot or purchased and then shipped home to Europe. What is critical to realize is that the profits generated through these sales of specimens allowed Wallace to finance his collecting, with profits funding further forays in the tropics. This economic depend­ency, in part, helps to explain the unique enormity of his Southeast Asia collection, amounting to 125,660 specimens.    
    His role was that of a colonial entrepreneur who ingeniously collected for sale large quantities of longhorn beetles from the rotting trunks of trees deforested in order to make space for early coal mines in the north of Borneo, and who approached the birds of paradise via the logging roads beginning to cut through the landscape.²⁰ His travels and his successes were entangled in the system of coloniality he was a part of; he capitalized on the growing demand for tropical specimens and, "wherever he went, his safety depended on the protection and practical infrastructure afforded by colonial political authority."²¹ Indeed, besides their curious aesthetic and zoological value, museum skins are evidence of the historical infrastructures and trade networks disseminating tropical species from the colonies to collectors and museums in the imperial centers. As Corey Ross observes in Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire:

“Europe's empires created institutions and forms of governance that were specifically designed to travel. They applied technical and scientific knowledge that claimed universal validity. Perhaps most importantly from an environmental perspective, they assembled markets and trans­port networks that spanned oceans and conti­nents [...]. Trade links were the vital sinews of European empire, and fom 1870 to 1940 world trade more than quadrupled.” ²²