Within the days when color printing was extraordinarily costly, the Avicultural Society had particular appeals for funds to help the looks in Avicultural Journal of the occasional color plate. A widely known hen artist was then commissioned. Though the entire run of the Society’s magazines will be discovered on-line, the plates hardly ever see the sunshine of day. Subsequently I made a decision to point out one, every now and then, on this website. That is the eighth within the sequence.
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This plate illustrates an article by the artist, George Morrison Reid Henry (1891-1983). He revealed and signed his work ‘G.M. Henry’. Certainly one of eleven youngsters, his father was supervisor of tea estates in what was then Ceylon. He was educated at house by his older sisters. After working as a laboratory assistant he was taken on as a draughtsman by the Colombo Museum. He labored his manner up and in 1913 was appointed to a brand new put up of Assistant in Systematic Entomology. He stayed in in that put up till he retired in 1946. His son, David Morrison Reid Henry (1919-1977) was additionally a hen painter.
The Sri Lanka spurfowl (Galloperdix bicalcarata) is endemic to Sri Lanka the place it’s comparatively widespread within the lush forests however much less generally seen. It skulks in forests and Henry wrote ‘that with the attainable exception of a number of the rails, probably the most troublesome to watch in Nature of any of the Island’s birds; such contacts as are made with it being usually confined to a short glimpse because it dashes into cowl when all of the sudden encounter some jungle path’. We noticed it at Sinharaja Forest Reserve in 2013.
Avicultural Journal 66, 1960