Of all the bird families, the hummingbird held the greatest fascination for Gould, and most of the plates were drawn from specimens in his own collection, with the help of a pool of collectors whom he commissioned to hunt for rare or unknown varieties in South America. He exhibited the collection, which included nearly 2,000 birds from 300 different species, at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, attracting nearly 75,000 visitors and consolidating his reputation as one of the greatest living ornithologists.

To illustrate the birds' iridescent plumage, Gould had used a costly technique of painting in varnish and oils over pure gold leaf, which he claimed to have invented but which he seems in reality to have borrowed with very little modification from the American hummingbird specialist William Bailey. Gould’s claim that the subscribers to the Trochilidae included ‘nearly all the crowned heads of Europe’ (Tree, p. 164) was a slight exaggeration, but there is no doubt that the magnificence of the illustrations, and the Victorian vogue for hummingbirds, attracted a larger and more brilliant audience than all of his other works except The Birds of Great Britain.

Gould died after the publication of part 1 of the Supplement, having supervised the preparation of many of the plates. The book was completed by Sharpe who finalised the text, W. Hart, who did the drawings, lithographs and colouring for the 58 remaining plates, and the ornithologist Osbert Salvin, who directed the general production. Soon after Gould's death his bird collection, which by then included 5,378 hummingbirds, was purchased by the Zoological Society, and is now part of the British Museum's natural history collections.

First edition; 6 vols, folio, (55 x 35.5 cm); 418 hand-coloured lithographs, many heightened with gold leaf & other iridescent mineral paints, overpainted with transparent oil and varnish colours, after John Gould, H.C. Richter, and W. Hart, Kimbolton Castle book plates, scattered spotting to contents; contemporary full green morocco, spines elaborately gilt in compartments and on the five raised bands, boards richly panelled with neoclassical gilt rolls and fillets, gilt rolls to turn-ins, yellow coated endpapers, all edges gilt.