A rare bird’s mysterious journey seems to have taken it from New Guinea to the taxidermist’s table, then from somebody’s display case to a dumpster in northern Ontario, and finally to the Canadian Museum of Nature.
Gregory Rand, the Ottawa museum’s collections manager for birds and mammals, recently pulled on purple protective gloves to show the taxidermied red bird-of-paradise to CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning.
The “very fancy-looking bird” native to a select few Pacific islands features a black head, burnt-yellow neck and shoulders, multiple hues of brown on the rest of its back and two distinctive, twirly tail streamers.
Despite those distinctive features, the tipster who texted Rand about an old display case found in a dumpster in Elliot Lake, a city of about 11,400 between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie, was fixated on a different bird altogether.
“They were wondering if I was interested in a shrike, which is a Canadian species that was in there, but in the background of the picture I noticed something a little particular,” Rand said. It was the little red bird of paradise, which is definitely not indigenous to northern Ontario.
Little else is known about how the rare specimen wound up at the museum’s facility in Gatineau, Que. The bird appears washed out on one side, likely from spending years on display in the sunlight.
Rand said the bird could have been taxidermied in the late 1800s or early 1900s.
“Trying to guess how it made it to Elliot Lake is a bit of a mystery. It’s possible it would have been bought by someone or inherited — sometimes they end up in attics or basements and when people are emptying a house, they don’t know what to do and it ends up in a dumpster.”
WATCH | More about the museum’s tropical bird:
There’s a rare red bird-of-paradise in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s archives, but how it got to Canada remains a mystery.
Now that it’s in the museum’s collection, Rand said the bird could be used for educational or research purposes. The museum’s Gatineau research facility will be open to the public during its annual open house on Oct. 18.
Ottawa Morning asked other local museums for quirky items in their collections this summer, and were shown everything from wax fruit replicas to an underwater microphone to Roman coins.
