The Paradise Riflebird (male and female) drawn by Ebenezer Gostelow in 1937. It is difficult to do justice to the electric blues, greens and purples of the male bird’s plumage. In real life, even the black feathers seem to shimmer with these colours. Photo: NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
A photograph showing the male riflebird encircling his wings during the mating dance.
MANY recounts of bush journeys in early newspapers told tales of the magnificence of the play of light on the male’s plumage and the abundance of the winged creatures in the scrubs and the rainforests, especially during the mating season in late Spring and early Summer.
The beauty of the male’s iridescent feathers and its habit of throwing its head back and forming an encircling bower with its wings as part of the mating ritual did not flow through to its common name – Rifle Bird.
Instead, the name comes from its colouring being vaguely reminiscent of the uniforms of early 19th century British Army riflemen.
A naturalist described the male Riflebird in the Moreton Bay Courier in 1850 as “one of the richest in its plumage of the Australian fauna”.
But while early articles about the bird were fulsome in compliments about its sheer beauty, most of those same articles are confronting to read.
A perfect example is the naturalist whose article was published in the late December 1850 edition of the Moreton Bay Courier.
He describes in detail how the males would rise from the thickets to preen and dance in the higher branches of a closely spaced Hoop Pines as soon as the Summer sun shone on the tree tops.
He wrote of the extraordinary calls they made as they made short flights from tree top to tree top – short flights which he believed were also part of the mating ritual.
“After 10am, the male Riflebird descends lower down where he still keeps up the cry of ‘yaaas’ every ten minutes.
“You wait with patience and after a short time you see him with wings encircled and his head thrown upon his back, and whirling round and round, one way then the other. “After that he will cautiously show his head.
“Then is the moment! You take aim, pull the trigger, and the shot hits him in the head, and he falls lifeless at your feet.”
THESE types of stories taper off in the late 1870s, probably due to the 1877 Native Birds Protection Act which banned the shooting of a whole screed of native birds, including the Riflebirds, between October 1 and March 1, each year.
Whether Riflebirds continued to be shot for sport or for the dinner table is unknown but it would certainly have slowed the tales of the hunt appearing in newspapers.
