Birding Without Borders

by Noah Strycker

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  A few months into my Big Year, Joseph Yenmoro, who works at a dive resort on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, took a group of Japanese tourists on a firefly-watching excursion. Joseph is a scuba guide, but after more than a decade of entertaining visitors to Papua New Guinea he’s learned about the above-water wildlife, too, including birds. He has wide features, a toothy smile, and round cheekbones, and is now the most experienced birder living on New Britain. That evening, as Joseph drove through an oil palm plantation, he saw something interesting fly across the road.

  He’d spotted a shadowy shape there several times after dark and always assumed it was a Rufous Night-Heron, a common nocturnal species. This time, though, the shape landed on a fence post, and Joseph realized it wasn’t a heron at all. It was an owl.

  “Oh, my God,” he said to the Japanese tourists. “That’s a Golden Masked-Owl!”

  The group seemed unimpressed, even when he excitedly explained that this owl was one of the planet’s least-known bird species—it had not been seen alive in about thirty years. In all of history, in fact, the Golden Masked-Owl had been observed only three times by ornithologists: single sightings in 1967, 1985, and 1987. The island of New Britain, roughly the size of Taiwan, is virtually unexplored by birders, and those few who do visit tend to return to the same places over and over. Nobody knew where to look for a Golden Masked-Owl, so the bird had stayed off the world’s radar.

  The owl looks similar to a Barn Owl—flattened face, pale plumage, no “ear” tufts—with black speckles covering its golden yellow body. It is endemic to New Britain, in the Bismarck Archipelago northeast of New Guinea. Nobody knows where it nests, what it eats, what it sounds like, its population status, or even what habitat it prefers. It might have been thought extinct, except that in 2013 Joseph found a dead one on the grounds of the Walindi dive resort where he works. Since then he’d hoped to spot a live bird, and now one was staring straight at him with black, watery eyes.

  “Does anyone have a camera?” he asked the tourists, but nobody did—they just wanted to see fireflies. After a minute, the owl flew away, and Joseph reluctantly continued his tour.

  The next evening, he returned with a resort manager and located the bird again with a spotlight, this time capturing a short video—the first-ever footage of the species—which they posted to YouTube. Word of the discovery trickled out, and a couple weeks later a group of birdwatchers on a Rockjumper tour photographed the owl with Joseph’s help. Each time, it was found in the same area, patrolling an oil palm plantation.

  This was about the last place you’d expect to find a mega-rare bird: less than a mile from a popular resort, in a heavily degraded habitat. Oil palm plantations, widely regarded as one of the world’s worst environmental scourges, have been blamed in recent years for wholesale destruction of tropical forests, especially in Africa and Asia. On New Britain, these plantations have replaced massive tracts of jungle: between 1990 and 2000 alone, a quarter of the island’s lowland forest was cleared to make way for the lucrative crop, which is now one of Papua New Guinea’s largest exports. If current trends continue, most of New Britain’s forest will be gone by 2060.

  Palm oil, squeezed from nuts produced on squat trees, is used in half of all supermarket products—including lipstick, soap, chocolate, instant noodles, bread, detergent, and ice cream—and labeled under a host of names, such as vegetable oil, vegetable fat, glyceryl, and Elaeis guineensis (the plant’s scientific name). Just today, you’ve probably eaten palm oil, washed your clothes with it, and rubbed it on your scalp, skin, and teeth. The stuff is ubiquitous—it’s even an ingredient in biofuels—but nearly invisible. Few people realize how much palm oil they consume, and even fewer know where it comes from. The global demand has doubled in the past decade and is expected to double again by 2050, “at the expense of tropical forest,” according to the World Wildlife Fund.

  It was surprising that this rare owl was staked out in, of all places, an oil palm plantation, which is about as environmentally friendly as a concrete parking lot. By the time I arrived in Papua New Guinea, I’d seen my share of these plantations elsewhere, especially in southeast Asia, and they seemed to offer little wildlife habitat. But I have looked for birds in some pretty strange places, so if finding a Golden Masked-Owl required entering an oil palm plantation, I didn’t have a problem with that. I squeezed in a little extra time for the search.

  But first I had other business to attend to. My visit to New Britain was an afterthought, added to a longer stay on the main island of New Guinea, which concluded an eventful month of island-hopping around the region. After leaving the Philippines, I spent a week in Thailand with a young bird addict named Panuwat “Par” Sasirat, who invited several friends for a whirlwind tour of his home country. Outside Bangkok we found the endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper, a tiny shorebird with a spatulate-shaped bill, at a commercial saltwater evaporation facility—another super-rare bird in a manmade habitat. Then I made a quick visit to Sri Lanka, with its suite of endemics, before dropping into Peninsular Malaysia, where a friendly birder, Cheong Weng Chun, whisked me into the highlands for a few days. From there I bounced over to Borneo to spend a week looking at White-nest Swiftlets and orangutans in the deep jungle—and lucked out by snagging all three uncommon “Whiteheads” in one day: Whitehead’s Broadbill, Whitehead’s Trogon, and Whitehead’s Spiderhunter. In Indonesia, on the island of Sulawesi, famed for its hundred species of endemic birds, a young man named Monal Capellone showed me the strange Maleo—a ground-dwelling, vaguely chickenlike bird that incubates its eggs in hot sand near volcanic vents. Finally, by way of a half-day layover in Bali with local birder Pak Yudi, I landed on the shores of Papua New Guinea.

  When birders think of New Guinea, they usually imagine birds-of-paradise: about forty species of elaborately colorful and intricately decorated birds, confined to the remote jungles of New Guinea and surrounding islands. Sir David Attenborough, after filming his landmark Attenborough in Paradise documentary, grandly concluded that “birds-of-paradise are the most romantic and glamorous birds in the world.” Alfred Russel Wallace, the nineteenth-century naturalist who copublished the theory of natural selection with Charles Darwin, called them “the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the Earth.” Birds-of-paradise were my priority here.

  From Port Moresby, the country’s rough and bustling capital, I took a prop plane to the settlement of Tari—a few buildings with a gravel airstrip—in the rugged, mountainous interior of New Guinea. I’d arranged to stay at Ambua Lodge, an eco-friendly accommodation in beautiful cloud forest at 7,000 feet, where birds-of-paradise can be found literally at the doorstep.

  The first one I saw, a few minutes after stepping into my round, thatched-roof cabin, was phenomenal: a Superb Bird-of-paradise, which recently topped a BBC list of the world’s “ten sexiest male birds,” perched in a tree right outside. The display of this species is so bizarre that it doesn’t even seem like a bird. When a female Superb Bird-of-paradise comes along, the male goes into a crouch, erects a shimmering green breast shield, raises a cape of black feathers from his back, and points his bill upward so that his body becomes an iridescent, abstract shape—more like a flying saucer than an animal. He rapidly bobs up and down, shuffles side to side, and snaps his tail, rotating his body each time the female moves so that she gets the full effect. If she likes him, they mate on the spot, and the female goes off to build a nest by herself.

  My favorite bird-of-paradise, though, required a little more work. After hiking a couple of miles up a muddy track the next morning, I found a small bird with an elongated name: the King-of-Saxony Bird-of-paradise, which lives only in the mountains of central New Guinea. This one compensates for its diminutive size with a pair of slender, zebra-striped head plumes, attached above its eyes, that are almost twice the length of its body. The bird can move these plumes independently, like a pair of expressive antennae, and they
look so weird that when the first specimens were shipped back to Europe, scientists thought they were fakes. I heard this one before I saw it: a rough, whirring buzz, increasing in volume over several seconds. Eventually I spied the bird, perched at the tip of a tall snag, waving its plumes around like a colorful insect, bobbing its body for extra effect.

  These birds-of-paradise lived up to my expectations of New Guinea: wild and bizarre, lost in a pristine forest where uncontacted tribes still roam. The intrusions of outside civilization—the gravel airstrip at Tari, the lodge at Ambua, and a gravel road traversed by lumber and gas trucks—seemed slight against such rustic surroundings. I stayed in these mountains for several days, soaking up their birds and their ambience, before taking the prop plane back to Port Moresby. It was now a week into December, and my month of island-hopping was over; I had my sights set on Australia and the end of the year.

  But before making the final leap Down Under, I wanted to chase the Golden Masked-Owl. When else would I have a chance to lock my eyes on such a rare bird? It was a tantalizingly short hop away—and so I took the connection over to New Britain.

  The transfer from New Guinea’s impenetrable highlands to the lowlands of New Britain looked like before-and-after photographs of a terrible catastrophe. As my plane descended over New Britain’s shores, instead of jungle I saw miles of dark green, evenly gridded trees hugging the coastal plain: oil palm plantations. From the air, they resembled some of the banana farms I’d flown over in South and Central America earlier in the year, except on a more breathtaking scale. New Britain Palm Oil Limited, the main corporation on this island, has 227,000 acres under cultivation—more than 350 square miles, an area nearly twice as large as Singapore—which, at 150 plants per hectare, represents more than 13 million oil palm trees. All of it was once rainforest.

  Joseph, the owl guy, met me at the Walindi resort, a dense collection of cabins hemmed on three sides by oil palms and on the remaining side by the ocean. I soon discovered that every other guest here was seriously into scuba diving. The area between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea is part of the so-called Coral Triangle, the world’s most diverse reef system, which makes diving at Walindi a little like birding in the Amazon. Coming for birds had all the earmarks of searching for diamonds in a copper mine, but I liked it that way. No wonder the Golden Masked-Owl had been overlooked for so long—everyone on this island was preoccupied with oil and coral.

  The number of bird species on New Britain is relatively low, especially in the cleared-out coastal areas, but a high percentage of them are endemic. The island, which lies over the subduction zone of the tiny Solomon Sea Plate, is one of the world’s most active volcanic hotspots; one of its provincial capitals, Rabaul, was annihilated as recently as 1994 when ten feet of ash buried the city. Because New Britain has never been connected to the larger island of New Guinea, its birds have had ample time and isolation to evolve into new species such as the New Britain Kingfisher, New Britain Boobook, New Britain Rail, New Britain Thrush, New Britain Friarbird, and New Britain Sparrowhawk.

  Joseph and I spent our daylight hours looking for some of these endemics. He took me into the adjacent oil palm plantation, where we drove slowly down the rows of trees, patrolling in one of the dive resort’s trucks. The plantation held more activity than I’d anticipated: Black Bitterns, White-browed Crakes, and Stephan’s Doves skulked in weedy spots, while enormous Blyth’s Hornbills swept between trees. Common Kingfishers perched on pipes beside irrigation ditches, and Eclectus Parrots squawked from unseen perches in the canopy. I had to admit that this place was lively.

  As we waited for darkness, Joseph explained the basic operations of this plantation. Oil palms grow basketball-sized clumps of nuts, which crews of laborers cut off with twelve-meter-long saws. The oil is milled onsite, then shipped to special refineries. The trees are replanted on a twenty-year rotation—not because they’ve become too old, but because they have grown too tall to be harvested easily. We saw the whole process: the nuts were cut, thrown in large tractors, and taken to camps.

  It was all very efficient, and efficiency is the main argument in favor of palm oil: compared to similar crops (such as soybeans and canola), palm trees can produce ten times as much oil per acre.

  At dusk, we drove to the area where Joseph had first discovered the Golden Masked-Owl, about a mile from the resort. He’d seen it several times since, so I had high hopes. In darkness, we meandered slowly through the plantation, sweeping a powerful spotlight across the trees with their clumps of nuts hanging in silhouette.

  The landscape wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined Papua New Guinea. Everyone associates this country with wild, untamed wilderness—whether it’s highland jungles, pristine offshore reefs, or vibrant indigenous cultures—without an oil palm in sight. Those people and places are all there, but exotic isolation is not the whole story.

  “There!” exclaimed Joseph, pointing parallel to the beam of his spotlight. “Did you see it? The owl just flew up into the next tree.”

  We’d been searching for less than half an hour. On foot, we crept forward, holding our breath. I caught the eyeshine, and Joseph lit up the tree with his light.

  “Yes,” I said, quietly. “I’ve got it.”

  Until this year, nobody had seen a Golden Masked-Owl alive since before I was born. Now an owl gazed down at us, in full view, twisting its head with curiosity. It was my 5,605th bird of the year. Time, which had marched so fast lately, slowed down; it might have been ten seconds or ten minutes. I snapped a couple of photos. Then, as if remembering a prior errand, the owl turned, spread its wings, and silently flew down the next row of trees, disappearing like a ghost into the palms.

  16

  From End to End

  CHRISTMAS ARRIVED in Paynes Find, in the dry interior of southwest Australia, with a predicted high temperature of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. The town, such as it was, consisted of a few outbuildings next to an old mine pit, a forlorn stand of windblown trees, and a faded highway sign that proclaimed, “Next services 275 kilometers.” It was the least Christmassy place I could imagine.

  For me, the holidays are about spending time with family, decorating a tree, putting up lights and stockings, opening presents, sipping hot chocolate, and curling up next to a fire on a snowy winter’s day. None of those things would happen this year. In Australia, Christmas comes in midsummer, so the local traditions are a little different: many Aussies celebrate the day with seafood cookouts at the beach, swimming, and getting a tan. It’s not unusual for Santa to arrive on a surfboard, or for people to do their shopping in shorts and flip-flops.

  Not even those traditions applied to Paynes Find, which is a six-hour drive from the beach—or from anywhere, actually. I’d arrived here yesterday with Frank O’Connor, one of southwest Australia’s top bird experts and the only Aussie I knew willing to spend the holiday with me. Frank showed up with a printed target list, including estimated probabilities of encountering each species, predicting that we’d find 30.6 new birds (well, make it 31) in the three days we had allotted. When I rolled out of bed at oh-dark-thirty, I found Frank already awake, sitting up with a genius-level Sudoku book propped in his lap, ready to go. He was just the guy I needed! The target list was my Christmas wish list, if only Santa were listening.

  Frank had suggested we get up at 4 A.M. on Christmas to take advantage of the cool dawn hours at Paynes Find. By sunrise we were standing on an iron-red dirt road, surrounded by scrubby bush, as birds woke up all around us. I’d put in so many mornings this way, listening to birds while the sun gradually lightened the eastern horizon, that it felt comfortingly familiar, even though nothing else about this Christmas was at all normal.

  We spent a few hours prowling the back roads, turning up goodies like a jaunty Crimson Chat, a pretty little stocking stuffer, and several Mulga Parrots in the shade of a mulga tree.

  “When you’re birding, any tree could be a Christmas tree!” I said, and Frank smiled. The parrots, shiny
green with bright red bellies, were aptly attired for the season.

  The only real Christmas tree we saw was at the dusty roadhouse in Paynes Find, which had a handwritten “Closed for the holidays” sign propped in the window. Next to the lone gas pump out front, someone had stacked nine tractor tires in a rough pyramid with a traffic cone balanced on top, and painted the whole thing green. The tires were decorated with tinsel and hanging ornaments: Christmas, outback style.

  Frank and I didn’t encounter another human all morning, but we found a few special birds on my wish list, including a White-browed Treecreeper hitching up a gnarled snag. Once the heat set in, we began the 280-mile trip back to Perth, where Frank planned a late dinner of turkey pot roast at his house. On the Great Northern Highway, a flat ribbon of asphalt, the scenery came straight from a Mad Max movie.

  Things had gone very well so far in Australia, in the weeks since I had left Papua New Guinea. For five days based out of Cairns, a proficient and laconic birder named Del Richards took me through mangroves, wet rainforest, and dry interior savanna. His strategy was to get all the honeyeaters, figuring the rest would show up along the way—and it worked perfectly. Del and I also tracked down the world’s second- and third-largest birds: a wild Emu (properly pronounced eee-myew, not eee-moo) and a Southern Cassowary, a murderous-looking creature more dinosaur than bird. From Cairns, I hopped down to Brisbane for a thirty-six-hour blitz with a group of keen young birders, then continued straight to Melbourne, where I experienced my hottest temperature of the year—110 degrees Fahrenheit—and visited the world’s largest sewage treatment plant, a bird paradise. I made two fast out-and-back trips, one day in Tasmania followed by two days on the north island of New Zealand, to scoop up their impressive endemic birds before flying to Perth on Christmas Eve.