Specimen R 7259 Dried Skin - Red-rumped Parrot, near Gunbower, 1857, Psephotus haematonotus haematonotus

Summary

This bird specimen was collected during William Blandowski's expedition to the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers (December 1856 - December 1857). It is from a group of specimens collected in the Gunbower area from 1-16 February 1857. Its original tag '425' is still intact and the expedition register refers to this bird as a 'Red rumped grass parakeet'.

The species was illustrated on the expedition and back in Germany in 1861, Blandowski's artist Gustav Mutzel completed a watercolour painting of the species (see Figure 397 on Plate 102 of Australian parrots for the Birds of Australia series). The original painting is now missing from the Museum fur Naturkunde (Berlin), however they still hold colour reproductions which were produced as a commemorative plate to go into Richard Pescott's 'Collections of a Century: The History of the First Hundred Years of the National Museum of Victoria' published in 1954.