JAKARTA, Indonesia – A team of scientists has discovered a lost world of rare plants, giant flowers and bizarre animals – including a new species of honeyeater bird, a tree kangaroo and an egg-laying mammal – on a mist-shrouded mountaintop in a remote province of Indonesia on New Guinea island.
Flown by helicopter to a mountain preserve nearly untouched by humans, the scientists found more than 40 species new to science. They also spotted the legendary Berlepsch’s six-wired bird of paradise, a species with distinctive wiry head plumes that was first described in 1897 but has proved elusive ever since.
Team leaders on Tuesday described how they spent two weeks in December, butterfly nets and binoculars at the ready, traversing the foggy slopes of the Foja Mountains in Papua province. Among trees furry with moss and draped with huge ferns, they marveled as birds and animals approached with no fear.
“It has a fairy land quality,” said Bruce Beehler, an ornithologist with Conservation International in Washington, D.C., and the expedition’s co-leader. “It’s a spectacularly beautiful Garden of Eden.”
Beehler spent more than 20 years trying to put the trip together. Finally, the team of 13 scientists, including three Americans, reached the Foja Mountains.
Within minutes after they landed on an open, boggy lake bed, two team members spotted a blackish, chickenlike bird with strange orange wattles, Beehler said. “It was freaky looking,” he said.
He determined that it was a new species of honeyeater, making it the first new bird found in New Guinea in more than 60 years.
Another night, the expedition’s other leader, Stephen Richards, almost stepped on the tail of a long-beaked echidna, a bizarre, egg-laying mammal like a hedgehog that is also called the spiny anteater. It was so unused to human contact that it allowed Richards to pick it up and carry it back to be examined.
The team also spotted a golden-mantled tree kangaroo, the rarest and most beautiful of jungle-dwelling kangaroos. It had previously been found only in Papua New Guinea, a separate country that is part of New Guinea island.
The team found a giant rhododendron with a blossom 6 inches across, which they believe might be a new species. Richards found a tiny frog less than half an inch long.
“I know the Bush administration is talking about going back to the moon and going to Mars,” Beehler said. “But there are plenty of new things to look for right here, in our rain forests, in our oceans. There are whole worlds that are unknown to us.”
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