Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds (1871) is an oil on mahogany panel picture by Martin Johnson Heade acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 1982. Inspired perhaps by the works of Charles Darwin and Frederic Edwin Church, Heade planned to produce a deluxe book in the 1860s depicting Brazilian hummingbirds in tropical settings, and, to that end, created a series of 40 small pictures called "The Gems of Brazil". The project was abandoned, but Heade retained his interest in hummingbirds and continued to paint them in combination with orchids and jungle backgrounds through the
Flower constancy more dissimilar, for example in their coloration. When, in a community of flowering plants, the flowers are all similarly colored, the constancy is often lower because different species are more difficult to distinguish, whereas constancy tends to be higher when the flowers are distinctly differently colored. Flower constancy benefits flower pollination but, arguably, constancy is not so obviously adaptive for pollinators. Individuals that show constant behavior ignore other flowers that could potentially provide more nectar (reward) than their preferred type. As a result, flower constancy seems to contradict optimal foraging models, which assume that animals will move minimal distances between