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 well known hen artist was then commissioned. Though the entire run of the Society’s magazines could be discovered on-line, the plates hardly ever see the sunshine of day. Subsequently I made a decision to indicate one, from time to time, on this web site. That is the seventeenth within the collection.
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The plate was the work David Morrison Reid Henry (1919-1977) in 1952. He signed his work as D.M. Henry and was an artist favoured by the Avicultural Society for the plates revealed on this interval.
The accompanying word was by Cecil Stanley Webb (1910-1977) described by Geoffrey Marr Vevers as ‘one of many biggest animal collectors of all time’. Webb began amassing in 1919, reaching his heyday within the Nineteen Thirties and 40s (after discovering himself stranded on Madagascar in the course of the Second World Struggle). He grew to become Curator-Collector for the Zoological Society of London, then Curator of Mammals and Birds. He then moved to Dublin Zoo the place he was Superintendent. From then till his demise he lived in Kenya.
Webb describes how the place in West Africa (British and French Cameroons) and the way he caught these birds (the one illustrated was one he delivered to London in 1947); the ‘how’ can finest be described as ‘uncomfortably’.
The Blue-shouldered Robin-Chat (Cossypha cyanocampter) throughout a swathe of Africa within the following international locations: Cameroon; Central African Republic; Republic of Congo; Democratic Republic of Congo; Côte d’Ivoire; Equatorial Guinea; Gabon; Ghana; Guinea; Kenya; Liberia; Mali; Nigeria; Sierra Leone; South Sudan; Sudan; Tanzania;Togo; Uganda.
Avicultural Journal Vol 58, 1952