![]() ![]() I saw a bird with a mass of splendid green feathers on its breast, elongated into two glittering tufts but, what I could not understand was a pair of long white feathers, which stuck straight out from each shoulder. He seemed much pleased, and said, 'Look here, sir, what a curious bird,' holding out what at first completely puzzled me. "Just as I got home I overtook Ali returning from shooting with some birds hanging from his belt. In his 1869 book The Malay Archipelago, Wallace recounts how: In October 1858, Wallace and his assistant Ali were collecting specimens on the island of Bacan (which Wallace called Batchian), in what is now Indonesia. Fortunately, Peter was enthusiastic and after much paperwork, the specimen was purchased and exported and is now part of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum's collection. The only Wallace specimens in museums there are a dung beetle in the Sarawak Museum and a small flycatcher in the Singapore Museum, which wasn't even collected by Wallace or his team. 126,000 animal specimens which Wallace and his assistants collected in the region are in UK museums. I thought it would be fitting for such a specimen to go to a museum in the 'Malay Archipelago' given that most of the c. ![]() Peter Ng, Director of Singapore's Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, whether his museum might be interested in purchasing it. I asked him to reserve it for me for a few days so I could ask my friend and fellow Wallace aficionado, Prof. I contacted the dealer for more information and he told me that he had bought it as part of an old collection from a French Chateaux, but that he didn't know anything about its history. Not only that, but this was a specimen of probably the most iconic animal species that Wallace discovered during his whole collecting career. ![]() I knew that this was something very special, as to my knowledge no Wallace bird specimens had been offered for sale on the open market for very many decades. Even better, I saw from the red stripe across the top of Wallace's label on the skin, that it was a specimen from his private collection, not one he had been planning to sell through Samuel Stevens, his natural history agent in London. To my surprise I saw that a UK dealer in Victorian taxidermy specimens had an old museum study skin of this species for sale, and amazingly, it was one which Wallace's assistants had collected for him in East Gilolo (now Halmahera Island) in 1859. In December 2017 while preparing a talk about the Birds of Paradise that Alfred Russel Wallace collected in the 'Malay Archipelago' (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and East Timor) during his 1854 - 1862 expedition to the region, I did a Google search for information about Wallace’s Standardwing Bird of Paradise. ![]()
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