If there was ever proof that good things come to those that wait, it was my recent and unforgettable visit to the renowned birding destination of Papua New Guinea.
- Discover the spectacular birds of paradise with their remarkable plumage and bizarre courtship behaviour
- Birds of paradise ‘glow’ in secret biofluorescent courtship dance
Reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago as a teenage birder, I recall being transported to a land of astonishing birds with unparalleled beauty and wonderfully bizarre ornamentation. More inspiration came with Bruce Beehler’s Birds of New Guinea, the first definitive field guide to the island. Flicking through page after page of sumptuous illustrations, it was always the birds of paradise that flew straight off the pages and into my imagination.
I knew I would see them for myself one day but I never imagined that day would take almost four decades to come: it was October 2024 when I finally touched down on the world’s second-largest island.
The “toughest birding you’ll ever do”
Papua New Guinea is synonymous with birds of paradise, hosting 33 of the world’s 45 species. Some 26 also reside in Indonesia’s autonomous province of West Papua, with a handful in North Queensland and the remote islands of the Malay Archipelago. But actually finding them, particularly in Papua New Guinea, is widely touted as the ‘toughest birding you’ll ever do’.
It’s not hard to see why. Two-thirds of Papua New Guinea is still forested, with a whopping 85 per cent classified as ‘untouched’. Many birding locations are remote and difficult to access, and permission to enter tribal lands is not easy to come by.
Even if you do manage to get there, you have to negotiate steep, rugged terrain and cope with the challenges of dense tropical forest. And finally, with intense hunting pressure in certain locations, these birds have become highly elusive.
But seeing these forest jewels can still be done, as I was to find out. I’d been invited to Papua New Guinea as part of a group to learn about the eastern side of the island, and would be based in the central Highlands, around Mount Hagen. This extinct volcano lies in the sweeping, fertile Wahgi Valley, hemmed in by tree-covered ridges that have barely changed in tens of thousands of years.
The journey begins
A short drive into the hills took us to our first birding spot of Kumul, a lodge tucked into Mount Hagen’s forested flanks. Its owners put out supplementary fruit, much like we do with peanuts and sunflower hearts.
“Be prepared for something special,” teased our guide, Wilson, as we walked through the dimly lit corridors into a space that doubled as both dining room and bird hide. Peering through the slats on the end wall, I could see a stage comprising a series of fruit-laden bird tables connected by horizontal wooden bridges. I didn’t need a field guide to identify the male brown sicklebill tucking into papaya to my right, and the male Stephanie’s astrapia expertly extracting pineapple pulp to my left.
Just like that, having mentally prepared for blood, sweat and tears, I had bagged my first birds of paradise. My first impression was just how large they are – almost a metre in length from crown to tail tip. My second, with the sun beating down, was the dazzling iridescence of their plumage.
Famed for its unique courtship display, the brown sicklebill – along with its close relative, the black sicklebill – is endowed with feathery, epaulette-like tufts that it raises over and behind its head into a scimitar-shaped crescent. While the astrapia is not quite as capable of such levels of transmogrification, it more than compensates with a pair of preposterously long and brilliant-white tail feathers, and a scintillating green sheen that would have even South America’s hummingbirds reaching for their sunglasses.
Also hopping among the feeders was a female brown sicklebill, who was decidedly less glamorous than her male counterpart. The reason, of course, the males look and act like they do is down to these powerfully fussy females. Over countless generations, the females’ preferences have driven the males to favour beauty over utility. In other words, how you look and display trumps other important survival strategies, such as mastery of flight or the ability to hide from predators.
Why birds of paradise thrive in New Guinea
Added to that, New Guinea has a complex geological history that has forced birds of paradise to endure successive periods of isolation over the past 20m years. This physical isolation, even over relatively small areas across the island, combined with intense sexual selection, has led to the stunning diversity present today.
I had an instant craving for more. I was rewarded the next day at another lodge called Magic Mountain, whose slightly lower elevation in the cloudforest provided an entirely different suite of species. Another feeding station instantly delivered the spectacular ribbon-tailed astrapia, which is subtly different to the Stephanie’s. Handsome though it was, the ribbon-tailed was no more than a warm-up act to surely one of the island’s most sought-after species: the King of Saxony.
The King of Sax
The secret to finding the trickier birds of paradise, such as the celebrated King of Sax, is not to head randomly into the nearest patch of forest but to be targeted in your approach. Employing an experienced guide who knows the location of display perches is crucial. And so it was that our new guide, Paul, whisked us away to a prominent line of trees at the forest edge.
Slathered in lotion to keep both the sun and the mosquitoes at bay, we desperately scanned the canopy for movement. As is so often the case with birding, we heard our quarry before we saw it. Sounding like a cross between a hyperactive cicada and bad radio static, the peculiar call enabled us to pinpoint a male high on a branch.
No larger than a European starling, his black back, head and bib contrasted with his yellow belly and orange wing bar. But his dapper hues were eclipsed by his outlandishly lengthy head-plumes, which resembled the antennae of a long-horned beetle and were being wafted around in extravagant fashion.
It’s quite surreal coming face-to-feathers with a bird you’ve waited half a lifetime to see, and the King of Sax did not disappoint, flying straight into the top five of the 3,000 or so species of bird I’ve been lucky enough to see. But with the clock ticking, there could be no dawdling. We moved on to our next high-altitude destination, taking the short but bumpy road across to the other side of the Wahgi Valley.
Rondon Ridge: the best place for spotting birds of paradise?
Rondon Ridge has long been celebrated as one of the best locations for birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea. It was only 50km from the forests we’d just visited but its physical separation resulted in yet another new assemblage of species. We met our guide, Joseph, at dawn. He explained that, as many birds of paradise are dedicated frugivores, the smart move is to “follow the fruit”. Joseph had already pinpointed some promising trees and suggested that, instead of chasing ghosts in the tough, uncompromising forest, we let the ghosts come to us.
When it comes to searching for birds in tropical forest, patience is essential. An hour quietly watching and waiting produced nothing more than a grand total of two sightings – the yellow-browed melidectes and the endemic Papuan white-eye. Both were ‘lifers’ to virtually everyone in the group, yet were not the reason we had travelled all this way.
Rondon Ridge sits at an altitude of more than 2,000m, and the chilly morning air had caught us out. Shivering and fidgeting, we were about to call it quits but Joseph implored us to persevere. As if by way of reward, a vision in blue suddenly flashed past and took up a prominent position in a tree, clearly ready for breakfast.
The male blue bird of paradise is not only one of the world’s most beautiful birds but also one of the easiest to identify, thanks to a combination of electric-blue wings and tail, amber flank plumes and long black tail streamers, all set against glossy black upperparts. His astonishing display involves hanging upside-down then spreading out and shimmering his flank plumes while tossing his head from side to side like a manic metronome.
While our luck didn’t extend to the display, we were nevertheless thrilled with our front-row seat as this bobby-dazzler of a bird gulped down a few berries before melting back into the forest. Then, to our utter joy, the same tree played host to a male greater lophorina. Perhaps better known by its former name of superb bird of paradise, this species’ scarcely believable display was first filmed in 2006 for the BBC series Planet Earth.
The bird has since been split into three species, the males of which can all raise not only their startling blue breast shields but also an array of jet-black nape plumes, fanning them out into something resembling an extended version of Dracula’s collar. This striking costume is topped off with small patches of iridescent blue feathers above the eyes, giving the impression of a slightly demonic but mesmeric grinning face.
Males usually select a horizontal log as a dance floor but witnessing their display usually requires weeks in a tiny, cramped forest hide. Nonetheless, we were treated to the first act with the arrival of a brown and streaky female, who prompted the male to momentarily raise the feathers of his breast shield, forming what superficially looked like a huge and lustrous moustache.
The tenth (and final) bird
The days were passing quickly. We had had more hits than misses (we won’t mention the unsuccessful two-hour wait for a noisy king bird of paradise to show himself). Yet one mega-bird remained on our list. Celebrated as Papua New Guinea’s national bird, the Raggiana bird of paradise is supposedly named after an obscure 19th-century Italian marquis called Francesco Raggi. Every inch the quintessential bird of paradise, the males have outrageous orange-red flank plumes and iridescent green throats.
The penultimate day of the trip took us to Varirata National Park, which sits on the appropriately named Bird’s Tail Peninsula. It’s by far the most popular reserve in the country and was the first time I’d felt on the beaten path. It was here that I hoped for a rendezvous with the Raggiana.
This is a lekking species. Several males turn up at dawn and dusk to display at a long-established arena high in the canopy. The ritual has been fine-tuned over millennia with the sole purpose of impressing any fastidious females looking to couple up.
Arriving at sunrise and barely a few steps from the access road, all we had to do was step into the forest and gaze into the noisiest section of canopy above our heads, where the lek was apparently in full swing. Two competing males fluffed up their candy-floss flank plumes, lowered their opalescent heads and frantically flapped their wings to reassert their position in the pecking order. This ostentatious behaviour was accompanied by otherworldly calls.
The Raggiana marked my 10th and final bird of paradise in just a week. For a moment, standing among the trees, I was that teenage birder again, this time witnessing these wondrous birds for real. I wondered what must have crossed Wallace’s mind when he first laid eyes on this startling display back in the 1850s – it must have blown his socks off, too. Was it worth the 40-year wait? Absolutely.
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Main image: a Raggiana bird-of-paradise in Papua New Guinea
