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I am very curious about the identity of the feathered subjects on the cover for Susumu Yokota's 2000 Album "Sakura."enter image description here

The one on the left seems to be some kind of hummingbird. Not sure what family the two on the right belong to, let alone genus or species.

Assuming they aren't fictional species created in an ad-hoc manner for the album art, which I hope isn't the case, does anyone recognize them?

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There are two species of bird shown in the illustration. The one on the left is Eupetomena macroura, the swallow-tailed hummingbird. This bird lives in eastern South America, primarily Brazil.

The species on the right I can't identify. From the style of the illustration, it appears to be a 19th-century zoological illustration, and is not likely to be an original for the album cover.

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    $\begingroup$ It looks very much like the work of ornithologist John Gould's wife, Elizabeth. $\endgroup$
    – anongoodnurse
    Commented Oct 22, 2023 at 22:34
  • $\begingroup$ @ mgkrebbs Wonderful. I had a feeling the hummingbird was real. As for the other, perhaps you might be right. It has to be a passeriform at the very least. I find unsolved mysteries rather troublesome so perhaps I'll try to get a definitive answer elsewhere. $\endgroup$
    – KeturiosBlue
    Commented Oct 27, 2023 at 4:57
  • $\begingroup$ @anongoodnurse I looked at her illustrations on Google and the birds she drew bear a striking similarity to these little ones. There's no artist credited for the cover on the album's Wikipedia page or Discogs, so who knows who created it. I don't think it's likely that he had some other artist's work copy/pasted though. $\endgroup$
    – KeturiosBlue
    Commented Oct 27, 2023 at 5:02
  • $\begingroup$ Perhaps Sunbirds of some type? $\endgroup$
    – John Robinson
    Commented Jan 5 at 20:18

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