These are birds of paradise.
They’re a plant that looks like a bird. (No, really.)
They’re native to South Africa, but we’ve got ’em all over the place out here in California, where they’re used as a common ornamental plant.
The other night I was at a square dance and, between tips, I went outside for some cool air, since we’d been hot hashing really fast and I’d worked up a sweat. (Man, that was fun! My square got through the hot hash tip without any mistakes! Yee-haw!)
In the moonlight, I got to looking at the birds of paradise that were planted around the War Memorial Building (in Balboa Park, for those who know San Diego) where the dance was being held, and I got to thinking: These really do look like birds. I mean, amazingly so.
The fact that they’re not birds is obvious to human eyes if you get up close to them, but not all creatures have vision as good as humans, and not all see them up close.
So I thought: This can’t be a coincidence. There has to be some advantage to the plant if it looks like a bird. So what might that be?
Well, an obvious one is that if you’re a plant that looks like a pretty bird then humans will take a liking to you and plant you all over the place, thus furthering your survival/reproductive aims.
But I don’t know if humans have been doing this kind of horticulture for long enough to have tailored this plant breed to look like a bird (though we may have).
On the other hand, bugs eat plants and birds eat bugs, so maybe if you’re a plant that looks like a bird, it’ll scare off the bugs. Some bugs may have an avoidance instinct for anything that has a bird-like silhouette, so having one would again further the plant’s survival/reproductive aims.
And then what might birds think of this plant? If I were a bird that looked like this plant then I might want to hide among a bunch of them and thus mask my signature from potential predators. If these plants provided such birds with a really good hiding place then they’d hang out among them a lot and end up . . . uh . . . providing them with fertilizer, which will again further the plant’s survival/reproductive aims.
So this is getting kinda familiar: A plant that takes the form of an animal for purposes of furthering its own survival/reproductive aims? Possibly intermingling with the actual animals that it imitates?
You’re next!
(Oh, and before someone else says it: "No, it is I who will replace you!")
I miss them.
If the pictures on the Wikipedia article (which by the way has an outdated taxonomic system so I would not place complete trust in it) gives an authenic picture of the wild type plant, as it should it it only gives in the caption the scientific name of the plant not a “var.” or whatever, then we can accept that it naturally has a “bird-like” shape.
The first question should therefore be, are there any birds in its native range that resemble the flower. True birds of paradise are native to Ausralasia and these to Africa, so scratch that initial idea. True birds of paradice don’t look all that much like the flower anyway, having fancy tails not fancy wings.
Can any bird have really fancy wings and still fly?
If the flower did resemble a bird it interacted with, what would be the purpose? Some flowers resemble female wasps to trick the males into trying to mate with it, and in the process polinating it. I believe it is not just a matter of looking like a female wasp but producing the same pharomones.
Birds don’t use pharomones (most have no sense of smell at all) and I’m sure none would be dumb enough to mate with a flower like this.
Scaring away insects with a still, large, vaguely bird-shaped flower? I have great doubts about that.
Would the still, brightly colored birdlike flowers attract real birds so try to blend in, I doubt that even more.
These flowers are meant to attract sunbirds to polinate them. The large bracts or leaves (?) that you would call the body of the bird is clearly there as a perching place for the sunbirds. Such a structure is very common in plants polinated by birds, unless it is humming birds that can hover. The two joined blue petals form a nectary which will be awkward for the bird but ensure that some pollen gets on its feet. Needing to attract birds, the plant produces an additional blue petal resembling a nectary, and three large yellow sepals to catch the eyes of the birds.
The superficial resemblance to a bird is probably just that, and also seems to be greater in your horticultural variety than in the wild type (I presume) shown in the Wikipedia article. This is likely due to breeding. I doubt a non-human would pick up on the resemblance in either case though, especially since real birds never hold that position, at least for long, when not flying.
Was not St. Augustine’s first book called something like The Beautiful and the Useful? If I remember right he said (the book itself was apparently lost even as he wrote his Confessions) that what is beautiful is useful to the creature that has it. Scientists like to harp on structure and function, how function determines structure. The Christian might reflect on how the structure of natural creatures is beautiful, indeed a reflection of divine Beauty, but how in his goodness and power God ordained that each beautiful structure be useful and important to the creature that possesses it.
I think the whole line of biological thinking is wrong. Interesting, but wrong.
This is all about ladies’ hats (millinery to the literary).
Feathers from the “Bird of Paradise” birds starting showing up in wealthy European ladies’ hats in the 16th century. Feathers from birds killed in Australasia.
It is these dislocated feathers in the hats that lent themselves to the naming of the flower. Here is a hat with a flower painted in place of the feathers.
So the plant is not named for the living bird, or the natural arrangement of feathers on the bird, but rather the arrangement of plucked feathers from the dead bird on a ladies’ hat.
From an article on Edwardian millinery:
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Wings and cock feathers are also adjusted in this becoming fashion. Bird of Paradise plumes distinguish many of the best creations, and little other trimming is used with them. They are shown in exquisite colors, some shading from the palest tone to the darkest. Purple is especially favored, and when used to trim a hat of dark purple velvet or chenille is wonderfully pleasing.
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From a recent article in the Jakarta Post about the illegal poaching of the birds:
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The Bird of Paradise, which lives in a range of territories, from coastal mangrove forests to cool mountain areas, has been admired for hundreds of years for its beautiful plumage.
Aristocrats in Turkey and France, who wore their feathers as fashion accessories in the 16th century, thought the plumes came from mythical birds which were immortal. Chinese traders reported that the birds lived in the air and always turned to the sun, only descending to the Earth to die.
Europe used to be the main market for the plumes, used for women’s hats and accessories. Trade in the plumes reached its peak in the late 19th century. Plumes from more than 50,000 birds were exported every year, generally to Paris for capes and hats.
By the 1920s, with the bird population decimated, the Dutch stopped the trade.
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That helps explain the name, but not the issue of why the flowers look like birds to us. You need science, not history, for that.
Assuming the countenance of birds is just a test of these plant’s metamorphic faculties. Their true goal is, in fact, to someday be able to assume the human shape, in order to covertly infiltrate and someday control our society.
This they do in the hopes of gaining control of Vermont, which, as everyone with a rudimentary education in science knows, is the only place they can obtain their precious “magic” stones that they use for building their “magic” castles on their “magic” planet on the edge of our “magic” Solar System.
There is a way, however, to stop these creatures: extra-strength weed-killer. It works every time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go dump plant-poison on all of the flowers in my neighbourhood.
Dear J.R.,
So, the flowers do not, in fact, look like a (living) bird of the 45 or so species commonly called “bird of paradise.” That common name of the flower is related to the (plucked, dead) bird by way of its feathers in a European ladies’ hat.
The flower does have another common name: Crane Lily. This names makes a little more sense in the “flower looks like bird” department. The flower does look a bit like a crane bird (neck and head/beak).
The blue crane is the national bird of South Africa. Amazing coincidence, that.
Old Zhou,
This is a silly thing to turn into an argument, but just note that in my second paragraph I eliminated the idea that they looked like birds of paradise.
My post was not on how the flower got its name, but whether its superficial resemblace to a bird “can’t be a coincidence” as Jimmy said. I think it is a coincidence, perhaps helped along with some human breeding in the case of the flowers in Jimmy’s picture.
they are one of my favourite flowers and yes, I miss them, too.
Well, here is the best “source,” a third grader in Cape Town, South Africa:
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Strelitzia reginais known as the Crane flower because it looks like our National bird, the Blue crane. It is a very popular flower in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It was named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz – Queen of England.
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http://www.wcape.school.za/mickle/Wildflowers/page5.htm
You can’t argue with third graders when they say that a flower looks like a bird.
Why?
Because God made them that way.
It is a nectar producing plant that attracts sunbirds, (and here) the only bird that seems to naturally be equipped to access the nectary.
So, the shape of the plant seems to be, as JR indicated above, designed as a bird perch so that the sunbird (or other nectar eating birds), can perch briefly and eat the nectar from the flower, and pollinate the flowers at the same time.
Note that the way in which the flower looks like a bird to Jimmy (and me at first) and the way it looks like a crane to the African girl are different. In one case the bottom bract (or whatever) is interpreted as the body and tail, and the sepals as wings. In the other the bract is the head and the stem the neck of the crane. It is all subjective.
God made it that way sure, and made us in a way that we would see elephants in the clouds and birds in the flowers.
Not sure what all the hubbub is about, bub.
This is what a Birds of Paradise looks like.
They’re like huge seed pods!
So, is the definitive evidence that birds evolved from plants? A plant desired to be a bird —it was sick ‘n tired of being stuck in the same place and dissed— and viola!