birds - P-NG style

Listen to the mocking birds - P-NG style

By Susi Collins

Lm a bird-listener now. I used to be a bird-watcher, but not long ago I put all that behind me when I went to Papua New Guinea, land of, supposedly, 568 varieties of birds.

I thought it would be pretty good bird-watching in a land where there were 568 varieties, so many of whose showy plumage and extra ordinary displays are without rival in the world.

I soon found out, however, that in the particular area where I was staying it’s easier to sample the com plete range of a certain brand of American soups than see a wide variety of Papua New Guinea’s re nowned feathered fauna.

Armed with binoculars, notebook, mosquito repellant, glucose tablets for exhaustion, matches to burn leeches off my body and a stout stick to do battle with anything reptilian in character, I skidded on sloshy trails, groped my way through soupy swamps, and even sank thigh-high in a mucus-looking pool—all for the pleasure of stalking birds whose songs or strange calls had made me childishly happy. But always the songsters eluded me.

Take the hornbill, for instance.

Its cackle almost splinters your skull.

It’s big and wears a yellow vest, and has a nose as large as a clam shell. (I know because I’ve seen a picture of it many times.) I’ve stalked this bird for hours over tentacle-like roots, meshed myself in strangling vines, sat death-like with leeches glutting themselves on me—all for a view of the grotesque hornbill.

But my reward was only the thrash ing of its wings and its nerve-shatter ing scream.

The jacky winters, butcher birds, wrens, blue-winged kingfishers, gos sip birds, etc all sang to me (in their own way) yet were as elusive as Lassiter’s gold.

“Doodle-doo”, called the little doves. “Doodle-doo” all day long, it seemed. But they, too, played hard to see, as did the cassowaries that woke me at 3.30 every morning with

their hollow drumming kind of call as they pussy-footed past my donga.

I would leap from my bed with glee, and peer through the wire mesh win dows. But ghostly mists, rising from the valley below, hid the creatures from me.

Now the goura pigeons are com mon enough, surely. A villager brought me a crown feather once.

“But I want to see a live goura”, I said.

“Plenty goura. Plenty moorak (cassowary)”, he replied, pointing to the swirling valley below.

I never did get to see a live goura.

Fluting, piping, screeching—birds, birds. I remember vividly the dramas of night when poignant cries, almost human-like, broke my sleep and I knew there were predators after my elusive birds.

If I’d seen all the birds I’ve heard, I guess I’d be unrivalled in the bird watching field. Through these dis appointments at not seeing my feathered friends, however, I culti vated extrasensory hearing; and with the help of my village friends I was able to identify many bird calls.

But it was Armand and Michaela Dennis who helped me, through their famous TV series, to identify the most rewarding of all bird calls— the Bird of Paradise (in my case the Lesser Bird of Paradise).

On the first leg of a two-day trek, I heard them—loud crow-like calls, aggressive and excited. High above, flashes of yellow and warm browns caught my eye.

I turned to my village companion, Saiya, who stood totally unmoved.

“Birds of Paradise, Saiya. No one back home will ever believe me”, I yelled in ecstasy.

Saiya said, “Often they come to this tree to dance”. A tree blossom ing with Lesser Birds of Paradise was just part of the fabric of Saiva’s life in the jungle.

But looking for birds in many parts of Papua New Guinea, isn’t easy.

That’s why I’ve become a bird listener!