Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
million inhabitants—and so much forest and rugged terrain, there may even be places where
people have never set foot.
Among wild destinations, New Guinea surpasses all others as an outpost of mysterious
dimensions. The lack of roads and few airstrips limit access to its isolated valleys. Flights
into the mistcloaked mountains are fraught with danger. In 1991, an up-and-coming field bio-
logist and a colleague, Ian Craven, perished when his single-engine bush plane crashed in
the island's far western wilderness. Then there is the famous disappearance of anthropolo-
gist Michael Rockefeller about fifty years ago somewhere on the southern coast. Explorers
of New Guinea know the risks and the challenges: avoiding deadly strains of malaria; living
on tinned mackerel and navy biscuits; not getting lost in the uncharted forest; and not getting
eaten. The highlands are known for their fierce mountain clans who wage ritualized war with
neighboring groups and occasionally dine on one another.
Then there are the rewards. On my first trip, in 1990, I carried along a copy of
BirdsofNew
Guinea
by Bruce Beehler and Thane Pratt. The pages of the bird guide and Dale Zimmer-
man's illustrations came to life when I saw and heard my first magnificent riflebird, a bird
of paradise, in a park outside the capital. Upon my return, I finally met Bruce, and discovery
of our mutual interests in New Guinea's unique flora and fauna led to more frequent contact.
I grew envious listening to his stories about what he had observed—the birds of paradise,
cassowaries, bowerbirds, giant fruit bats, tree kangaroos—and his biological surveys into the
most remote region of the planet.
The island of New Guinea is especially interesting to biologists because so many of its spe-
cies are found nowhere else. New Guinea itself is politically divided—the western portion is
Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), a province of Indonesia, and the eastern half is the sovereign na-
tion of Papua New Guinea, or PNG for short. The political division obscures a common geo-
graphy, similar rain forests, and shared cultures. No other large tropical island is so mountain-
ous, and the isolation created by its cordilleras, or mountain chains, has had a profound effect
not only on the evolution of animal and plant life but also on human communication. Nearly
one-fourth of all spoken languages on Earth are known only in New Guinea (about 1,100 true
languages, not including dialects), and most are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Lan-
guages, like birds of paradise or tree kangaroos, can also be labeled as endemic to a place.
And perhaps the same forces—geologic, geographic, and evolutionary—that resulted in so
many tongues spoken by so few people in this land might be related to why so many species
of widely different lineages occupy such narrow ranges: a prime element of rarity.
In the late summer of 2005, I received an excited message from Bruce that he would have
to bow out of a birding trip we had planned in Maryland. “I can't believe it,” he wrote. “After
