The Huon Peninsula is the only area of the world where the Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo lives, making it one of the more endangered mammals on earth. They are secretive and shy, living high in the canopy where mating is a delicate endeavor. A large arboreal python has a fondness for Tree Kangaroo, and they are prized meat for the native people as well. Hunting and loss of habitat are the main threats to the species.
Lisa has been educating the villagers since 1996 about this rare creature in their midst. What began as a research project evolved into an alliance of local people, scientists, and research institutions. There are forty-five villages and more than ten thousand people in the YUS region of the Huon Peninsula, named for the area’s three main watersheds, Yopno, Uruwa, and Som. The clans own all the land, which is true of most of Papua New Guinea. They took charge of their own future by creating PNG’s first conservation area, formally recognized by the government in 2009, giving the area the highest protection under the law. It means there will be no extraction of resources, including mining and logging. The villagers are still able to hunt the kangaroos sustainably in certain places but they are off-limits in 180,000 acres of protected areas. So far the villagers are honoring the rules. The Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo is a source of pride to them and to their children, who learn about the animal in school. The staff of the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program in the PNG office are all native men and women, which TKCP aids in further education. Gabriel Porolok completed his PhD at Cooke University in Australia and is now a teacher of biology in his homeland of Papua New Guinea, specializing in native flora and fauna. The Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo is his signature species.
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We spent the next day in our mountain aerie walking the climate change transect, which Bruce Beehler and fellow scientists are documenting over the course of many years. What will a warming climate mean for the animals and plants there? The path in this stunning primeval forest led us through ferns and mosses and abundant orchids, and past many species of trees, some 120 feet high, all of them new to me. Birds were the only visible life but hard to see against the green canopy. We glimpsed the Crested Berrypicker, different kinds of Honeyeaters, and lively Fantails, which flitted about with a flashy tail display.
There are no ferocious mammals in the Melanesian forests—a few boxing wallabies perhaps, but no felid or canid species, and no large bovids, ungulates, monkeys, or squirrels. Poisonous snakes, spiders, and insects are there, and even a poisonous bird. Some Pitohui bird species contain neurotoxic alkaloids similar to the Poison Dart Frog of the Amazon. The New Guineans have long known they are lousy to eat and have steered clear of them, but it took a Western scientist ingesting some of the poison on his hand to “discover” the unique bird.
The next day it poured, and the mild temperature plummeted. We read in our tents and played Scrabble, which George, with his quick wit, won. We had a discussion about conservation ethics. Some of us were concerned about the ongoing collection of species for science at a time when so many are threatened. Bruce defended the practice of collecting a minimum of five individuals of a species; he felt science needed to know as much as possible in order to save them. I said that collecting needed to be better regulated, as the right hand often did not know what the left was doing and there were too many people from too many places taking too many individuals. Lisa did not think killing an animal for study was necessary anymore, that technology had changed the way we learn.
Catching up on birds in the bush plane, on our flight to Tari Gap, PNG, 2010 Credit 4
The flight to the Highlands took us right to Ambua Lodge, decidedly upscale after tenting in Huon. The buffet lunch was a feast of fresh fruits and salads. Our spacious huts overlooked an expansive valley below, where bush planes landed several times a day. We shared the lodge with field managers of the huge liquid nitrogen gas company that was building new roads for drilling, promising jobs and wealth for the country. How long, I wondered, before they penetrated the most impenetrable areas of New Guinea with their technology?
After lunch Bruce found a flowering tree attracting the Superb Bird-of-Paradise and the Brown Sicklebill. This is what we had come for: the Birds-of-Paradise, what Alfred Russel Wallace in 1869 called “one of the most beautiful and wonderful of all living things.”
Wallace, the eccentric and brilliant biologist who published his theory of evolution at the same time as Charles Darwin but received virtually no attention for it, spent many months in the mosquito-infested Aru Islands southwest of New Guinea. He was the first Western scientist to see the Greater Birds-of-Paradise displaying in their “lek,” their frothy orange tail feathers rising and falling as they twisted and turned in communal dance. He did not see the extensive variation in all thirty-nine species because travel did not allow him the privilege back then. But he saw enough to ponder the question: What was the origin of new species and of variation within species?
He knew that species went extinct. Fossils told him that after millions of years the end came for most species. How, then, did new species arise? He didn’t buy the “special creation of God” dogma; he believed that new species were built on those that had come before. It was Darwin who used the phrase “natural selection,” while Wallace’s “gradual introduction” had yet to become “evolution” for both. A hundred years later the ornithologist Ernst Mayr was still deliberating: “Birds of paradise raise difficult questions, questions that penetrate to the very foundation of our biological theories. How can natural selection favor…the evolution of such conspicuously bizarre plumes and displays? How can it permit such ‘absurd exaggerations’ as one is almost tempted to call them? How can it happen that apparently closely related species and genera differ so drastically in their habits and colorations?”
Scientists today know that the “absurd exaggerations” of Birds-of-Paradise are due to sexual selection. “BOPs,” as they are nicknamed, and Bowerbirds live in a monkey-free world where fruit is abundant. They have no competition for resources, so they don’t spend an inordinate amount of time looking for food; this frees them up for courtship. The Bowerbirds create “courts”—mini-theaters, or bowers, where they build sets, erecting towers of sticks, grasses, or vines that they decorate with flowers, stones, plastic, berries, in fact anything colorful that they find, even Coke cans. Then they engage in some performance art on the stage for the females. They dance, they present gifts such as a bright red berry, or even a ring they’ve found, and they vocalize, mimicking animals, trucks, and human beings or running water. They are great at it. Some of the males even arrange stones in front of their bower to create perspective, the largest in front to the smallest in back, rivaling the work of some of our best Broadway set designers. This optical illusion seems to win the hearts of many females, and it’s not surprising, is it? There is a big “wow” factor there. Great artists, like great athletes, attract ladies the world over.
The Birds-of-Paradise work with their own bodies to entice females. Some of the species have evolved remarkable coloration, which they shake, run up and down poles, or hang upside down to show to best advantage. We saw the Raggiana Bird-of-Paradise the first day in Varirata National Park not far from PNG’s capital, Port Moresby. The lek, or communal courtship area, was about thirty feet high in dense trees. About twenty males were bouncing around dipping their yellow heads to better show their copious apricot-colored plumes to the females gazing from branches above like so many matinee ladies in the mezzanine. The males squawked and jockeyed for position while the females flew in and out.
The King Bird-of-Paradise has purple legs, silky red feathers on his head and neck and lower body, a ruff of beige and teal-blue feathers below his neck, a white chest, and two green fiddlehead discs at the end of long tail wires, which he can raise or lower at will. You get the idea. These colorations are outlandish, and like nothing seen anywhere else. Perhaps half of the thirty-nine species have these remarkable costumes, which they strut to entice. The other half are what Tim Laman and Edwin Sc
holes call “shape-shifters.”
Tim and Ed spent eight years in New Guinea photographing and describing all thirty-nine species. Their book, Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World’s Most Extraordinary Birds, is a remarkable achievement, highlighted by luscious photography and compelling insights, one of which is the descriptive term “shape-shifters.”
Bruce pointed out the Superb Bird-of-Paradise to us as it was bobbing about in panicles of white flowers. It was a female, not the male, who does the shape-shifting, but wonderful to see anyway and to know we were in their neighborhood. The male is all black except for a turquoise breast sheaf of feathers, which in display jut out from either side like the wings of a blue angel. When he opens his mouth to sing, the inner lining is lemon yellow. The shape-shift comes when the female is around. He lifts his entire cape of back and shoulder feathers and flips them over his head, creating a perfect half circle. With his head down, showing two tiny blue feathers like eyes above his ordinary black ones, his turquoise feathers spread like wings symmetrically to either side in front of the black cape; he looks like a huge smiley face sitting on a log. Tim and Ed made it possible to see this on film because it is rarely seen in the wild, and only patient biologists and their mentors Bruce Beehler and Russell Mittermeir have ever had the chance.
We saw a few more female BOPs that afternoon before the rain came down in torrents. I went to bed early, a cookie and a roll folded in a cloth napkin on my bedside table for a snack, only to find every crumb gone at 5 a.m. Little rat fingers had neatly opened the napkin and made off with the goods.
The Tari Gap, at seven thousand feet, is a great place to see the BOPs that live at this altitude and higher. We stood on the new road built by the liquid nitrogen gas folks and listened to all the morning birds tuning up. A male King of Saxony sat atop a tall tree stump rattling away. A Robin-sized bird of yellow, black, and white, he has two plumes twice the length of his body protruding from either side of his head. These aren’t ordinary feathers; they are more like wires with hard fish scales attached like tabs all along them. He can move these feathers any which way, much as Uncle Charlie can wiggle his ears. These antennae are highly prized by the New Guineans.
We saw more Brown Sicklebills, another shape-shifter, with their long curved beaks and their loud rat-a-tat-tat like an AK-47. But the most remarkable sight for me that day was the Ribbon-tailed Astrapia, which lives only in this one area of the world and has evolved as it has only because it has few predators, besides man. From the ridge I looked out over the endless green forest to the spine of the next mountain far in the distance. I thought someone had released a party balloon, because over the ravine two long ribbons floated rhythmically by in the sky. At first I didn’t see the dark body of the bird against the green, but when I did, the sight of it flying with yard-long tail feathers, three times the size of the bird and the longest of any bird in the world, was simply astonishing.
While the birds of New Guinea are unrivaled in the world for decoration and transformation, the same can be said of the people of New Guinea. Surely the birds influenced the costumes, dances, and art of the clans. It probably began in the Stone Age. Some fellow picked up a feather or two and put it in his hair, maybe with a few ferns and a peekaboo skirt of grass. It made a young lady smile. Add a few twists and turns, a couple of dips, and theater was born. The Birds-of-Paradise must have given the New Guineans lots of ideas, because there is nothing in nature as imaginative as their colorful displays and their shape-shifting dances. Every clan has their own unique way of decorating themselves, moving and vocalizing. This came about because of their isolation from each other. Today as many as seventy-five clans come together for an annual sing-sing festival at Mount Hagan in the Highlands, an event where tourists are welcome.
Costumes and makeup are a big part of my life. I have spent countless hours in my dressing room backstage applying line and color, seeking transformation. When the arch of my eyebrows and the rouge on my cheeks is just so, when the cut of my hair and the height of my heel is just right, when I don my petticoats, my cape, and my hat, I am finally in character and I am ready to make my entrance. The external change in me influences the internal. It is always transformation I am seeking—revealing parts of myself I didn’t know existed, becoming someone else. It is liberating to experience oneself as another being, and it is also revelatory. Becoming someone else is becoming everyman and everywoman. The universality of being human is found within each of us when we engage in shape-shifting…and perhaps of being animal too, a universality of all living things.
We went to meet the Huli Wigmen, the famous Highlanders of the Huli clan who use their own hair to create fabulous wigs, which reminded me of the Afros my black friends sported in the late 1960s. Those that choose to go to wig school grow their hair for eighteen months, spending nights sleeping with their neck on a block so it doesn’t get mashed. Then they cut it and fashion wigs for day use and for ceremonies. These headdresses last a long time and can be bought by others in the clan for about $600.
The wigmen performed a sing-sing for us. The best part was seeing them paint their faces before the event. It was a sneak peek backstage in the sunlight, as there was no dressing room per se. They had little bits of broken mirror and pots of bright red and yellow paint and small brushes. The process was the same as the half hour before any New York curtain. The chief’s concentration was fixed as he glimpsed his face in the mirror; he applied his makeup masterfully, yellow covering his entire face and then a red line down the middle of his nose, and two across his cheeks. At the end he pushed a long thin twig through a hole in his septum and the transformation was complete.
A New Guinea clansman making up “backstage” before the dance Credit 5
Brief squares of cloth covered their fronts and backs, and like Scotsmen over their kilts, they wore a kind of sporran with bits of animal fur hanging from their waists, which bobbed up and down as they hopped in unison. Their necks were ringed with shells and beads and their noses and ears were pierced with bones, feathers, or stems. They dipped and swayed like the birds, and in homage to them, their headdresses of hair were stitched with perfectly placed feathers of Raggiana, King of Saxony, and my beloved Ribbon-tailed Astrapia. They killed the birds for their feathers, but the care they gave the feathers made them last for years and has kept the birds from being decimated. There are species of BOPs and Bowerbirds that are on the threatened list today but due more to the new gas highway, habitat loss because of development, and the disintegration of traditional culture.
When we were in PNG an Irish company had recently erected towers on the high peaks and given out cell phones for four-month trials. The clans traded in the currency of pigs and had no written language, but several of the men mastered the buttons in a matter of hours and were chatting to each other across the village with dexterity and frequency. Perhaps the human brain is hardwired for this kind of thing. That little wonder in the palm of their hand suddenly ended a way of life that had prevailed for thousands of years. Just one cell phone in each village, conveying information, eliminated the need to walk two miles to the next village, something that had been a daily ritual. I wondered how their social life would change. I wondered how they were going to pay for the cell phones when the bill came due—in pigs? And what was so important that they were talking on them so incessantly? But then I wonder the same thing of my texting granddaughters, who are wearing out their thumbs with the need to communicate. Human beings are human beings the world over, and a new device has the same power to enthrall everywhere. The New Guineans will never be the same, and neither will we, with each new technological advance that enters our lives.
It is by increments that cultural traditions dissolve. One day someone dies and a recipe is gone forever, or a language, or a dance, or the technique for weaving a Huli wig. The new generation is not as interested anymore in learning from their elders. They flee to Port Moresby and listen to Western music and wear jeans and get into trouble, lik
e kids everywhere. But the territorial culture of violence follows them. In the Highlands the violence never went away; “an eye for an eye” still rules. Debts are paid in pigs, wives, and the local currency, kina, in that order. And when trade doesn’t work out, things get bloody. We met a young British woman working for Doctors Without Borders who said she operated daily on amputed fingers, hands, and even arms and legs as a result of clan warfare in the Highlands.
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