Drawn From Paradise. 

Birds of paradise are so breathtakingly beautiful that when their plumes first reached Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century even the most learned naturalists believed they lived high in the sky, feeding on dew, in paradise.As more species were discovered, each more extravagantly and strangely plumed than the last, fascination with them grew. This book surveys the paintings made by some of the greatest of natural history artists as they struggled to picture the reality of birds they had never seen alive, and tells the story of how the several dozen species in this extraordinary family were eventually discovered in the remote forests of New Guinea.