Here's a peek at my next Songbird ReMix set, "Orioles of the Old World" for Poser/DAZ Studio. Here's the Hooded Pitohui, one of the few poisonous birds in the world and found in New Guinea. In 1990, scientists preparing the skins of the Hooded Pitohui for museum collections experienced numbness and burning when handling them. It was reported in 1992 that this species and some other pitohuis contained a neurotoxin called homobatrachotoxin, a derivative of batrachotoxin, in their tissues. This led to them being more broadly known outside New Guinea, considered by some to be the first documented poisonous birds, other than some reports of coturnism caused by consuming quail (although toxicity in quails is unusual), and the first bird discovered with toxins in the skin. The same toxin had previously been found only in Central and South American poison dart frogs from the genera Dendrobates, Oophaga and Phyllobates (family Dendrobatidae). The batrachotoxin family of compounds are among the most toxic compounds by weight in nature, being 250 times more toxic than strychnine. Later research found that the hooded pitohui had other batrachotoxins in its skin, including batrachotoxinin-A cis-crotonate, batrachotoxinin-A and batrachotoxinin-A 3′-hydroxypentanoate. Poisonous pitohuis, including the hooded pitohui, are not thought to create the toxic compound themselves but instead sequester them from their diet. The presence of the toxins in the internal organs as well as the skins and feathers rule out the possibility that the toxins are applied topically from an unknown source by the birds. One possible source has been identified in the forests of New Guinea: beetles of the genus Choresine (family Melyridae), which contain the toxin and have been found in the stomachs of Hooded Pitohuis.