Victoria Crowned Pigeon is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Crowned pigeons are the biggest pigeons of the world and have the size of chicken. The bird’s vivid and unusual blue colour as well as his impressive crown make him a very fascinating creature. The bird is a perfect illustration of the weird giant life forms you find on islands such as New Guinea. Victoria Crowned Pigeon is threatened because the birds require large territories of undisturbed alluvial lowland rainforest and are restricted to the island of New Guinea, where the lowland rainforests are the most under thread. They are also heavily hunted by the local people for food, which causes them to be pretty shy. Our local guide had risen two chicks of a nest he found in the forest and of which the parents had been shot for local consumption. Because they were used to our guide, these two birds were unusually tame. Every evening the birds came to sleep in his garden in the same tree. This part of my guide’s garden was a small forest patch, where still many rainforest birds occurred. This created a unique opportunity to photograph this shy species in a natural setting.