About 10 years ago I watched a YouTube video that sparked something in my imagination I just couldn’t shake. It was The Birds of Paradise project. I felt like I’d been snuck into a secret wilderness for a front row seat at the bird’s own private dancing show. The beautiful colours, feather ornamentation, and crazy courtship dances and displays were truly mesmerising. I heard Ed Schols in an interview in 2022 refer to the Superb bird of paradise when he dances as a “psychedelic smiley face”. You really have to see it to believe it.
Almost instantly I imagined a story where all the Birds of Paradise belong to some sort of performing arts school where the troops all danced against each other. Like a hollywood movie about dancing such as “Step Up”, even though it’s cheesy you watch it and can;t look away! I kept thinking about the birds and this story long after I watched the original YouTube video. I have always been involved in volunteer work with different organisations, and love spending time outdoors. Over the years passing I’d be sitting watching Pelicans swim past in the river, or cleaning a Red-Tail Black Cockatoo cage and be thinking of the bizarre birds of paradise.
I wondered what else was out there on the birds to learn about them. I bought the book “Birds of Paradise” which showcased the work of Tim Laman and Ed Scholes and started googling everything I could find on them. Surely someone has written a children’s book or movie about the birds, they are hilarious!? I hunted around but there was nothing online. I wished I could click my fingers and get this story out of my head, into a manuscript and into the hands of a Hollywood producer. I got a massive piece of brown parchment paper from the radio station I was working at at the time and put it up on the wall in my apartment in Kings Beach on the Sunshine Coast.
I loved the contrast between the extravagant Birds of Paradise in New Guinea to a brown white and blue ‘rough around the edges’ but equally as amazing Aussie Kookaburra. Sketching and writing and changing the plot 100 times I landed on the storyline you will read today.
Then like most writers I sat on it for close to 8 years before realising I simply had to get it down on paper and not take such a cool idea to my grave. Trying to take an idea straight to a movie manuscript is a challenging feat, I was naïve to even think that would be a possibility. So, I decided to write the book first in the hopes that children love reading about the birds of paradise and their passion for the story would dictate what comes next.
