‘Quite literally.’

My cranky post from last week, “Getting There was Definitely Not Half the Fun,” whined on about how it took such a godawful looooong time to get to New Guinea. This week I’ll continue my rant by regaling you with a few stories about what it was like once we got there.

Dude Man sticking out like a sore birder at the Wamena airport

First, let me say that I am not sorry that we went to New Guinea. (Notice use of past tense here.) It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For one thing, we saw amazing Birds of Paradise (BOPs for short) and other species we can only find there. But I must say that I have never been anywhere quite like it — none of our trips to Colombia or Ecuador or Guyana or Uganda or any of our five trips to Brazil even comes close to how uniquely different this place felt.

Lovely — but empty — countryside

It was hot, but we’ve done hot (hello, Namibia). It was humid, but so was Borneo. Lots of places have been buggy. No hot water and intermittent electricity? Ditto. True, we were informed beforehand that it might be dangerous — there is a civil war going on — but “dangerous” doesn’t really hit home until you’re told to roll up your windows in the car so you don’t get kidnapped. I mean, in Botswana and Kenya we were warned that it wasn’t safe to walk around by yourself, but that was because of the animals.

“Our” village, Mingre. “Our” house is one of four or five in all

In some of the remoter areas where we were looking for BOPs, we were literally the only outsiders for miles around. There is no tourism, unless you count BOP-crazy birders, so there’s no lodging; villagers double up so you can stay in one of their houses.

Yes, we had our own room. And we were lucky to have a bathroom — to share

The countryside is divvied up by clans who control the villages and the land around them. Our local “handlers” would make arrangements with a clan to use the trails leading into “their” forest. Headlamps secured, we’d hike in the pitch dark so we could arrive by dawn to “blinds” located near the BOPs mating grounds, where we would wait — sometimes for hours — for the BOPs to appear and do their thing.

One of the blinds we used. The front is camouflaged with leaves and branches

Interesting note here: the BOPs clear an area on the forest floor to do their dancing rituals. To get them to appear, you place a few leaves on the cleared area. The birds hate their dancing ground messed up like that, so they show up to clear those pesky leaves away, and then (if you’re lucky) they stick around to dance.

Waiting inside a blind. At least this one had a bench. You peek out those holes when (if!) the BOPs appear. We were lucky; out of 16 BOPs, we only missed one

In the afternoons we would usually bird along the roads. But even here, on a public road, we needed clan permission — not to walk on their land, just to look at it. One day a very angry man rushed at us wielding not just a machete, but an axe. He had not been informed of our presence and was decidedly not pleased to see our group there. Some fast talking by our local handlers was required.

Markers like these denoted village territory. When you got to one, you turned around. Fast

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t take bird photos on these trips. They don’t turn out so hot with an iPhone. Dude Man takes amazing shots, but it takes months of painstaking sorting before they leave his amazing Canon. But I did get a grainy shot of a remarkable bird who, lacking fancy BOP plumage, builds a bower to attract a mate, then decorates it with all kinds of fancy stuff. In former times, these were colorful seeds or flowers. But the clever Bower Bird has adapted, and uses manmade materials to great effect.

A bower (as glimpsed from a blind), decorated with blue bottlecaps, orange plastic found objects, and shiny insect shells and bits of broken glass

If you look closely, you can see Mr. Bower Bird lurking in the bower between the small tree and the orange piggy bank. To get the bird to show up, you disarrange his pattern slightly, which gets him to come neaten it up. This time, the guide put a yellow bottle cap on top of the blue ones. Mr. BB showed up immediately to toss it out. Oh, and that orange piggy bank? The locals said it took weeks for him to drag it from the village.

I’ll leave you with pleasant thoughts of a plain little bird arranging his treasures…and with something truly scary: a growling baby. Something we did not see in New Guinea.

Amagansett, New York. August 2025