News > November 20, 2008

By R. Hunter Bratton | Staff writer

Bruce Beehler, vice president of Pacific Programs at Conservation International and distinguished ornithologist, discussed his recent trip to New Guinea on Nov. 13 in Wait Chapel as the first orator in the annual Voices of Our Times speaker series in his lecture “Lost World: Discoveries from the Edge of Civilization.”

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With pictures of wooly rats, pigmy possums, long-beaked akidnas and golden-mantled tree kangaroos, along with recordings of indigenous birdcalls such as those of wattled smoky honeyeaters, Berlepsch’s six-wired birds of paradise and golden-fronted bowerbirds, Beehler took a bursting audience of students, faculty and community members on a journey into the Pegunungan Foja Mountians of Western New Guinea.

New Guinea, the largest tropical island on Earth with elevations of over 16,000 feet where high glaciers are masked with permanent snow, is one of the most beautiful places on earth, Beehler said.

Slightly below the equator, West Papua is ecologically the richest providence in the Indonesian archipelago and a zoological treasure chest for Beehler and his team of scientists.

Tucked away in the depths of the south pacific and shielded by the protection of the Australian landmass, New Guinea remained an aboriginal paradise for much of its existence, that is, until the European trade of the Victorian era led trappers to poach the Papuan birds for their exotic plumage.

The turn of the 19th century was accompanied by an ornithological stampede of filchers who wished to exploit the virgin New Guinean land by capturing the birds of paradise and shipping the tufts, crests and quills back home to be incorporated in the wardrobes of the affluent.

Today Beehler, along with Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI), works to protect this unique biome. After receiving five national and four providential permits, and spending over 30 hours in the air, Beehler landed in a single-engine Cessna airplane on the Kwerba airstrip in the foothills of the Foja Mountain range. Beehler had reached the land of which he had dreamed for 23 years; a land which even the natives were prevented from exploring.

The Foja Mountains occupy 8,000 hectares of unadulterated flora and fauna where the puffy clouds and dewy mists keep blunt mountain tips cool, damp and shady. Here exist over 200 known species that subsist nowhere else on Earth. Equivalent in size to Rhode Island, the mountainous rainforest of unpaved and unmarked terrain is a wonderful target for natural conservation, says Beehler.

Even more, on this island, more than 1,000 distinct languages make people walking libraries of natural and historical knowledge. Yet, he says, the indigenes want what we Americans have; the new generations want development and are becoming less conversant on their history and culture.

Such circumstances are what make conservation so effortful, says Beehler. Biodiversity preservation is more than ensuring the saftey of endangered animals – one must also protect plant species such as red and white rhododendrons while increasing contentment among the locals.

Similarly, conservation must be blind to partiality towards the more endearing animals. Those species that do not attract attention, such as frogs and lizards, are equally important to biomic stability.

In two weeks, the team of entomologists, ornithologists, lepidopterologists, students and native guides documented more than seventy species that had never been seen before and confirmed many more rare animals. Beehler confessed that with all his efforts, still very little is know of the planet Earth and even less is known of such forgotten places as West Papua and the Foja Mountains. However, while the preservation of these hideaways is important, the conservation of our own corners of paradise is fundamental. “Let me work on the Foja Mountains,” Beehler said, “you work on those special places here.”