Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Tino also took us to the plains of Nazca, near the coast of southwestern Peru. In a Piper Cub hundreds of feet above the desert we saw vast numbers of lines etched in the pale soil and huge geometric shapes of animals, birds, and men dotting it for miles around. My favorite was a hummingbird, clearly defined by its long beak and wings. Walking the body of the bird on the ground later I found it impossible to define it from the trenches and dark rocks that made its outline. The shape was clear only from the air. Was this a shout-out to gods in celebration of the beauty of the bird? Or drawn for appeasement or a prayer for rain? There are lots of theories about the meaning of the Nazca lines, but no one really knows the truth, except that the artists lived around 700 AD and they clearly wanted to leave something of lasting value.

  Tino wants to leave a legacy also, something lasting for his country: the protection of its indigenous people and its wildlife. We spent a week together along with a few others exploring sites that ABC and ECOAN seek to preserve for endangered birds. We saw the rare White-winged Guan in the dry forest of Limones, passing through dusty villages on the way, scattering goats and an ancient breed of hairless dogs in our wake. A pair of the birds perched on a cliff face hundreds of feet distant, but we could make out their slender turkey-like features with the white primary feathers as diagnostic. I have eaten guan in Belize, although not this critically endangered species, and knew that the tasty flesh sustained people throughout Central and South America. It was no wonder this White-winged Guan was down to about 350 individuals. Organizations like ECOAN are campaigning to save the birds, but it is a tough war against hunger.

  In the Alta Mayo of the northeast our van negotiated treacherous mountain curves, braking often as we tumbled out to catch sight of a noisy flock of parrots or of raptors riding the thermals. Peru vies with Colombia and Ecuador for the most birds in the world, with close to 1,900 species. There are 135 different kinds of hummingbirds alone and in a little farming village that sits on a rise above quiet Lake Pomacochas at 7,500 feet, we saw one of the most spectacular.

  This is the home of the Marvellous Spatuletail, an exotic if there ever was one. His territory, in the middle of agricultural fields of maize and wheat, is a brushy outpost of flowering plants and shrubs. Looking down into the tangle from a dozen feet above, we waited and waited for the tiny marvel to appear. Suddenly there he was, zipping by so fast we caught barely a glimpse. But the tail feathers were unmistakable—twelve-inch-long flexible wires of white with black dots at the tip, undulating like seaweed fronds as he probed each bright flower for nectar. Yes, indeed—“marvellous”!

  Birding is a peculiar but deeply satisfying occupation—perhaps not an occupation at all but an obsession. We rarely get the perfect look at a bird that field guides or apps give us, but just being in the zone, the quiet and totally focused state of watchfulness that is required, is reward in and of itself. Our days in Peru were packed with birding in remote areas, checking off hundreds of species on our lists, prioritizing what to protect, and searching in vain for the most reclusive, like the tiny Long-whiskered Owlet, recently filmed for the first time in the cloud forest of Abra Patricia.

  We were lucky that afternoon high up in the mountains of Peru, where scant representatives of remaining polylepis bent low to the wind in exhaustion. Suddenly someone called out, “The bird!,” and there he was, several hundred feet above us. In the circle of my binoculars I saw a thrushlike chocolate-brown back, a fleeting white cheek with a dark eyeline, a fluttering among the small trees before he dashed over the horizon and was gone: the Royal Cinclodes. You have to admire a bird that can live at fourteen thousand feet. Some of the Corvidae family, crows and ravens, hang out there, and some raptors such as Lammergeiers in the Old World, but few passerines like the bird we just saw. It was enough to bear witness to its presence. And the feeling was rapturous. Spotting a bird you’ve been after for hours, or days, and finding it in a shaft of sunlight or hearing it sing in the forest is like peering into a bit of heaven. The image is indelible and birders have catalogs of mind photos they carry forever marking these sightings.

  If not for birders, the Royal Cinclodes would have been relegated to the annals of “once was.” Most people wouldn’t care; it’s not a bird they would ever see. What good is it in the world anyway? It does not feed anyone but a passing raptor, perhaps, and if it serves any purpose, it is difficult to know what. Its purpose is not ours to know. It exists, and it is an extremely rare species that any knowing birder wants on her list. So by serving the birders’ specialized passion, the people of Abra Malaga benefit, and the Royal Cinclodes is spared an early demise.

  The afternoon cooled as the sun lowered in the sky on the glacial ridge. The planting was done and the people gathered together on a small plateau and asked us to join them. The men formed a circle while the women and children kept their distance. But not us; Carol, a photographer, and I were asked to stay. The village leader began to speak in Quechua while Tino and Hugo stood by, listening. Tino smiled, nodded, and shook hands with the leader, proud of the project he had conceived for his fellow native people. Then two knitted caps with earflaps and long tassels appeared, the kind worn by the children. Tino beckoned us forward, and Carol and I shyly moved into the circle. I was embarrassed by our raggle-taggle hiking clothes, so drab in the midst of their kaleidoscope of color. They placed the caps on our heads and we were clearly thanked for our contribution to the day. This was unexpected, and tears flowed down my cheeks as I bowed my head trying to hide them. I fumbled with the brightly patterned cap and tied the woven straps under my chin as best I could. It was so small it perched like a top feather on my head. I laughed and then everyone was laughing as someone snapped a picture so the moment was caught forever.

  Looking goofy but touched by the gift of little hats in the Peruvian Andes, 2004

  It was not lost on me that the way of life of these people is on the verge of extinction. As with the Royal Cinclodes, the end is near, but for the people it will mean only a change of clothes, and perhaps language, education, better health, and shelter. The trees are planted. Now, years later as I write this, a half million polylepis seedlings have been distributed and are recolonizing parts of the high Andes. Dozens of communities have received thousands of fuel-efficient stoves and badly needed health care as well. One of the rarest birds in the world has been given a reprieve. Human beings intervened and gave the bird back the habitat it needed to survive, for the time being. Eventually the warming climate will push the Royal Cinclodes farther and farther up the mountain until there is nowhere else to go, and then one day the last of its kind will rise into the sky forever.

  11

  Papua New Guinea

  In Shakespeare’s dark Scottish play, the tragic hero Macbeth has been given the prophecy that nothing can harm him “till Birnham forest come to Dunsinane.” Knowing that forests do not move, Macbeth is lulled into believing his life is safe. But his enemy Malcolm has his soldiers camouflage themselves with tree branches as they storm the castle hill. So Birnham forest comes to Dunsinane after all, and Macbeth is vanquished.

  I did not believe we were going to be vanquished by the phalanx of grass-covered New Guineans advancing up the landing strip in the Huon Peninsula, but the unexpected nature of the vision before me brought the quote to mind. Only in the theater had I encountered fantastic happenings like this. But this was real, in secluded mountains on the other half of the world. Everything about New Guinea was surreal—from the people and their elaborate decorations, to the Birds-of-Paradise, to the teddy-bear kangaroos that lived in trees.

  The hidden men shook their grassy skirts, made a guttural chorus of sounds and high-pitched squeals, beat long bongo-like drums, looking first one way and then the other as they came closer and closer, then stopped abruptly. Their faces were obscured by long fronds on their rattan headdresses, adding mystery to the moment. This was our formal welcome to the village.

  The biologists Bruce Beehler and Lisa Dabek invited t
hree of us to join them in Papua New Guinea at their field sites and to witness conservation efforts. This was the inaugural visit of Conservation International’s Sojourns program, where Bruce worked. Bruce is a self-described “bird man,” a leading ornithologist in the study of Birds-of-Paradise and Bowerbirds and the coauthor of The Birds of New Guinea. In 2005 he and a team of eleven scientists did a biodiversity blitz in the secluded Foja Mountains of western New Guinea, photographing and describing many birds, frogs, insects, and mammals for the first time. He discovered a bird new to science, the Wattled Smoky Honeyeater. This and the elaborate courting behavior of the Bowerbirds and the Birds-of-Paradise led to 60 Minutes filming Bruce there in 2007, which made him a celebrity. I first met this delightful ornithologist at a benefit for a conservation organization. Bruce has a modest nature when it comes to his own remarkable accomplishments and an easy sense of humor. All it took was for me to say I would love to see Birds-of-Paradise and two years later we were on our way.

  Lisa Dabek grew up an asthmatic child in New York City who fell in love with animals even though she was allergic to their fur. She became senior conservation scientist at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, where she first encountered the rare Tree Kangaroo that became her life’s work. Lisa’s study site on the Huon Peninsula overlapped a transect where Bruce and other scientists were conducting long-term biodiversity studies on climate change.

  We flew in a single-engine plane to the village of Yawan, four thousand feet below the site, while we waited for a helicopter to take us all the way up the mountain. The Huon Peninsula is in the eastern half of New Guinea, part of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea, while the western half is part of Indonesia. New Guinea is the largest tropical island in the world, with the highest mountains of any island, some reaching fifteen thousand feet. It is close to the equator and carpeted in green. Everything about it is big, bizarre, and beautiful.

  The welcoming ceremony, called a sing-sing, moved down the grassy hill, past huts of bamboo thatch with borders of flowering shrubs as neat as in any U.S. suburb. The village was ringed by steep green mountains, a thin waterfall splashing its way down. People tossed flower petals on us as we entered the village. Leis of pungent marigolds were placed around our necks, and my companions and I were welcomed in Tok Pisin, or Pidgin, the lingua franca of New Guinea, where more than eight hundred languages are spoken. Lisa hugged the villagers and asked after them with a warm smile.

  We sat on benches in the bright sun and watched a performance. Teenage boys, their chests, legs, and faces painted with white and gray mud, wearing hula-type grass skirts, huddled in a teepee of banana leaves and flowers, trembling. Suddenly they burst from it like a rainstorm, whirling around in different directions, until they tore the teepee down in a dramatic finale. The storm was over. There were brief speeches of welcome and we reciprocated with thanks for the ceremony. Then we were draped with tapas cloth and given a colorful bag, the native “bilum” worn across the chest by all New Guineans, young and old. We had arrived.

  But the helicopter didn’t. It couldn’t get through the cloud cover, a common occurrence in PNG, where it rains a lot. We spent the afternoon visiting the tidy school, where boys and girls learned about animals and ventured a timid “My name is Winston…” We walked a narrow path to a neighboring village, logging our first birds and butterflies, and were surrounded by curious children in worn clothes from a “bale,” the donations of Westerners like us. Back in Yawan, Annie, a village leader, provided us with a meal of rice, greens, taro, and sweet potato, and we bedded down in one of her little thatched huts on stilts. New Guineans are small people, and we five Americans towered over them by a good foot. In addition to Bruce, Lisa, and me, our group included Caroline Gabel, whose Shared Earth Foundation conserves wildlife, and George Meyer, a creator of the TV series The Simpsons. It took some doing to squeeze our sleeping bags and gear into the space, but I slept okay next to George, who at six feet six inches had to bend his knees to fit.

  Around 3 a.m. I rose to go to the outhouse, which required stealthily getting my boots on, climbing down the ladder, and walking with my penlight on the slippery muddy path three hundred yards down to the two-holer. Insects and frogs filled the night air before I heard a deep escalating chant—a kind of rocking bass chorus that reminded me of Sioux Indian chants in North Dakota. Yawan is a Seventh-day Adventist village, but these were clearly not hymns, not at three in the morning.

  PNG is nominally a Christian country, having been converted by waves of missionaries since the nineteenth century. But animism and a belief in spirits still thrive in pockets alongside Christianity. The Adventists brought peace to Yawan, as well as sobriety, health care, and education, but much of New Guinea has a deeply ingrained culture of violence. There are hundreds of tribes or clans spread over the mountains, the rivers, and the coasts, in isolated areas where footpaths and waterways are the only means of travel. Different cultures emerged, each with different languages, dress, and art. Marriage is not allowed within the clan, so wives come from elsewhere. Constant warfare over boundaries, wives, and pigs was waged for centuries. So were cannibalism and headhunting until the 1950s, and in some areas into the 1970s, when government programs and Christian practices put an end to it.

  Yawan is a peaceful village, as are the other forty Lisa works with in this northwest sector of the Huon Peninsula. Twenty years of building trust with the people through a plan for economic development as well as environmental sustainability resulted in the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program. It directly helped twenty-six teachers graduate and return to their villages to teach; it donated solar-powered lanterns to aid health care workers; and it initiated the production of tree-shaded coffee for the Seattle market. In return the villages have developed multiple land use plans to mitigate what is called the “careless use of resources,” one of which is the endangered Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo, which New Guineans love to eat but no longer hunt in its protected areas. Conservation is not possible without buy-in from the local people.

  The helicopter arrived bright the next morning and we spiraled up the mountain to ten thousand feet and a glorious cloud forest. The helipad was a cleared spot overlooking ravines to the east and west. Paw prints of wallabies dotted the earth, and birdsong filled the air.

  In a cloud forest everything is wet. The footing was slippery, and mud smothered my hiking boots, but the riot of ferns and mosses, of orchids and bromeliads lacing the tree branches, was sumptuous. The Wasaunon field camp was above a little stream; a tarp-covered lean-to was our meal shack where we dined on crackers, soup, rice, and greens on place mats of palm leaves. The ten PNG fellows did everything with artistic flair. They put up individual tents for us and masked our latrine with a bower of ferns and flowers, as if for a Disney princess. I was glad it was so attractive on the outside, because inside the trench was so slippery it took infinite skill to squat.

  At ten thousand feet and forty degrees you don’t get the variety of night sounds you do at tropical elevations. But at dawn the songs of Spangled and Red-collared Honeyeaters rang out along with the din of cicadas. After a cup of rich New Guinea coffee and boxed cereal we all set out to find the Tree Kangaroos. Gabriel Porolak, Lisa’s PNG assistant, led the way. Gabe had tracked “Trish” and her joey the day before by her radio collar, so he knew where she was. Still, the thickness of the vegetation and the height at which Tree Kangaroos live made the exact location difficult to pinpoint. The ground was spongy with mosses and saturated earth, while tree roots crisscrossed the forest floor. I had to take care not to trip as we made our way through the dense foliage of tree trunks, saplings, and tall ferns.

  How one of the guys spotted Trish was beyond me. It took several minutes to find her with my binoculars, about forty feet up on a large branch of a tree. Her golden-brown tail hung down like a thick vine while her body was perfectly camouflaged in sunlit leaves where she was munching on a spray of orchids. Not far away was her joey, half her size, never before
seen by Lisa. He was out of the pouch by ten months old, so she guessed he was about a year and still going to his mom to nurse. They become independent at eighteen months. There are fifteen subspecies of Tree Kangaroos, all evolved, along with terrestrial kangaroos and wallabies, from an ancient arboreal opossum. In drier Australia they became bigger and stayed on the ground, while in New Guinea they evolved into distinct subspecies in remote niches.

  Every year the batteries need to be changed in the radio collar, and Trish was due. Her radio collar these past four years had taught Lisa and her staff a great deal about Tree Kangaroos—their range, courtship, what they eat, and the threats to their survival.

  The area underneath the branch was cleared of anything that might hurt the animals on impact. A young man of fifteen elected to climb the tree to induce her to jump. He started up the trunk barefoot like a Hawaiian native going for coconuts. But this tree was so big he could not get his arms around it, and his prize was forty feet up. Trish climbed higher, her little joey following as the boy came closer. Every time she moved up, so did he. We watched in admiration as the boy put hand over hand, foot over foot, as assuredly as Spider-Man, and reached the branch below where she finally stopped sixty feet above us. He noisily beat the trunk and Trish moved to the end, arching the tip with her weight, while her joey sought to join her. He must have thought better of it because he suddenly jumped, flying through the air for the first time with true grace for a round ball of fur. He landed on the soft forest floor unharmed, and the men ran to grab him. Trish made the flight herself within minutes, twenty pounds of her landing without a scratch. One man grabbed her by the tail and others held her by her neck and legs. Gabe removed her old collar and replaced it with a new one. She was relatively calm, having been through this three times before; and she was perfectly beautiful. Her plush tawny-orange fur circled a white belly, and her big eyes gazed at us as she suffered the indignity of being held upright in a splayed position. Her long black nails curved at the end with sharp points, good grips for tree climbing. Her joey was immediately christened “George” by the New Guineans in honor of our colleague George Meyer, who was deeply touched. I stroked baby George’s soft coat, touching his paws and his sweet gentle face with its pink nose. He was about the size of Paddington Bear—a huggable teddy.