So yesterday, my husband and I went to the New Jersey State Museum for the Birds exhibit. It's a very small museum and the exhibit is also VERY small but there were a couple of things that I enjoyed a lot: the Carolina Parakeet specimen, a male and female Passenger Pigeon and the side by side of the taxidermy species with the art representation of them (mostly figurines but some paintings, too).
What I noticed about the comparison of the 'real' birds and their representations is that, believe it or not!, the real birds looked much more colorful than the figurines or the paintings -one would think it would be the other way around, right? - and, not only because one would think that artists would try to make their work look prettier than reality but also because taxidermy degrades in time so the feathers became dull and faded in time.
I had never seen an actual Passenger Pigeon and was surprised by their size - they were pretty big! The male looked quite ratty (the end of its tail was all raggedy and shortened) but taking into consideration that they became extinct in the early 1900's, it was understandable.
And, of course, for me, the piece de resistance was seeing the Carolina Parakeet - which must have been absolutely BEAUTIFUL! It was smaller than a quaker, much thinner (had an elongated body and none of the 'roundness' of the quakers), with longer wings and a shorter tail, and the plumage (which must be completely faded by now as it also became extinct in the early 1900's) was astounding in that it was almost uniformly multicolored. The head and such were yellow/orange in color but although I doubt you can see it on the pictures, what looks to be green (like the wings and back) actually had feathers of different greens going to almost yellow. Gorgeous!
Unfortunately, I can't share the pictures with you because this site does not allow for direct uploading, Photobucket is now paid and all the sites that upload them into the net ask for a cell number so they can text a code to them and I don't have one.