Apus, Beautiful Southern Bird

19 June 2017

There can be few places more fabulous for bird watching than the Kalahari – by day you lose yourself in an indescribably lovely world of colourful feathers and beautiful sounds… and by night in an indescribably lovely sky of beautiful stars, among which are those that sketch out the five southern birds: a toucan; a crane, a firebird, a peacock, and a bird of paradise. Unutterably exotic birds, it is not hard to see why Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick Houtman celebrated them by placing them in the skies.

I spent last night exploring the smallest of the southern bird constellations – Apus.

Lying in an area of the sky strangely devoid of bright stars, the little constellation’s four brightish stars form, to my eye, one of the prettiest little asterisms in the sky: a small sliver of stellar beauty representing a bird of utmost beauty – what 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace called “the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth”: the birds of paradise.

Birds of paradise are found in New Guinea and surrounding islands. They are strikingly beautiful with their glorious iridescent colours and fantastical trailing plumes, some of the feathers as delicate as lace, while others shimmer with a dazzling metallic sheen. These glorious birds really do look like something you could find only in an imaginary land.

The brilliant plumes have long been prized as decorative objects in Asia. Hunters who traded the first specimens to Europeans in the 16th century often removed the birds’ wings and legs to emphasize the plumes. This inspired a notion that they were literally the birds of the gods, floating through the heavens without ever alighting, gathering sustenance from the paradisiacal mists, and only falling to the ground when they died. Hence the name of the constellation is derived from the Greek word apous, which means “footless.”

As a horticultural aside: These birds also lend their name to a beautiful indigenous South African flower ourStrelitzia reginae, more commonly known as the bird-of-paradise because its beautiful flower really does resemble the colours and shape of the exotic bird of paradise. (And for those who like to know this kind of stuff… The British scientist, explorer and botanist, Sir Joseph Banks [1743-1820] – who encouraged and patronised scientific activity all over the world – named the plant Stelitzia in honour of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, from the house of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The specific epithet reginae is Latin and means ‘of the queen’.)

In fact, we have birds of paradise all over the place here in South Africa – in our sky, in our veld and gardens and in our pockets! It also appears on our 50 cent coin.

Despite the dazzling bird it represents, Apus isn’t resplendent with bright deep sky objects for the observer (although, having said that, the few bright objects it does contain are beauties)… but oh my, an evening in Apus is as enchanting as the bird of paradise is beautiful.

Observations

16″ f/5 Dobs at magnifications of 150x, 228x, and 333x