Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
twenty-five years of trying, I have just been granted permission to bring a small research team
into the Foja Mountains!” More than twenty years of guerilla warfare in Papua Province had
prevented any field expeditions in this region. When Papua's political troubles subsided in
2003, Bruce joined herpetologist Stephen Richards of the South Australian Museum to try
once more. Two years later, in October 2005, villagers of the Kwerba and Papasena clans
granted Bruce and his group permission to enter their homeland. It would turn out to yield a
wonderful collection of naturally engendered rarities.
If New Guinea is the ultimate destination for field biologists, within it the Fojas loom as
the pinnacles of desire. The Foja Mountains were reportedly so inaccessible that humans had
never settled there. I had come to doubt whether places such as the Fojas still existed, geo-
graphic outliers with no history of interlopers—gold miners, oil drillers, religious zealots, or
armed guerillas—either seeking their fortune or looking for an escape from modern society.
The purpose of Bruce's expedition was to survey the biota and to find species new to scien-
ce and others poorly known that he thought might be inhabiting this isolated range. The Fojas
sit in the heart of Papua Province, and their summits reach 2,200 meters above sea level. The
surrounding 7,500 square kilometers, lightly inhabited by jungle dwellers, lack roads. Taken
together, the vast landscape stands as the largest expanse of pristine forest in the tropical Pa-
cific.
The Fojas have a reputation for repelling outsiders. The legendary secretary of the Smith-
sonian Institution S. Dillon Ripley, for whom Bruce had worked, tried to approach them from
the north in 1960. He failed because the rivers were not navigable. In the late 1970s, both
Bruce and Jared Diamond, a noted New Guinea bird expert long before penning his best-
selling
Guns,Germs,andSteel
, raced to explore them. Diamond, through helicopter and grit,
arrived first in 1979. He found a species that had eluded birders for seven decades, the “lost”
golden-fronted bowerbird, and returned home to bask in ornithological glory. His find earned
extensive press coverage, and his technical paper reporting the rediscovery of the bowerbird
enlivened the cover article in
Science
.
Bruce believed that the Fojas might hold many species new to science as well as others that
science had forgotten, the so-called lost species. Although they had not been declared extinct,
these “lost” species had not been seen in decades, a category of rarity but a half step from
oblivion. To help them, Bruce and Steve Richards assembled a team of crack naturalists who
specialized in different taxa—birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, other insects,
plants—along with several Papuan biology students. They would be guided by members of
the Kwerba and Papasena tribes who lived in the Foja region. The guides were as excited as
the biologists at the prospect of exploring this area. Not only were the Fojas uninhabited, but
also—as far as they knew—the mountains had never been part of their clans' hunting territ-
ories.
