The bird-of-paradise tradition in early Dutch and English travel literature

Record summary

Early modern accounts of birds of paradise repeatedly described the skins as perpetually airborne or lacking feet, because hunters or traders commonly removed the feet before export. The tradition is a particularly useful cryptid-comparison lead: a real animal, altered specimen, translation problem, and European expectation combined to produce an apparently impossible creature. It can be traced through named works and museum collections rather than a single encounter. The story’s exact origin and the role of different indigenous trading practices remain subjects for source-specific verification.