On our first day in camp, we set up our mist-nets and started working. One of the first birds we caught was this male King Bird-of-Paradise. I personally think that this is the most drop-dead gorgeous bird in the forests of New Guinea. The red feathers on the head and back sparkle in the light like spun glass, and the mouth is colored day-glow green. They perform an amazing display dance, all to impress the females, and the BBC was able to capture some of this on film.

There are lots of caves in the area, and in caves you can find Amblypygids. This one was the size of a smallish tarantula, with these long spiky recurved palps. They don’t seem to bite us, but I would hate to be a small insect wandering along the wall in front of him.

This Beautiful Fruit-dove (Ptilinopus pulchellus) was caught in our nets. We have also been watching and filming its nest, that has a single egg balanced on a climbing palm frond. It has always been seen on the egg, ever since the first time we flushed it, and the egg should be hatching any day now.

We think that this bat is Hipposideros wollastoni. These horse-shoe bats regularly fly around the top of our work and mess tents at night hunting for insects that are drawn to the lights. They echo-locate by sending focused pulses of ultra-high frequency sound from their elaborate faces, and then picking up the rebounding sounds with their large ears. Alanna Maltby is on our team, and she has been studying the echo-location calls of these and other bats in the area. Because of her work, I have been able to sample many bat species for viruses and get some fantastic photos of their echolocation equipment. (Photo by Jack Dumbacher and Alanna Maltby)

This tube-nosed bat (genus Nyctimene) is actually a small “flying fox.” These bats are still active at night, but they are not insect eaters (they are mostly frugivores or nectarivores) and they cannot echo-locate. Instead, they have large eyes and they navigate by sight.

A small team of us went to a nearby cave to explore the birds and bats living there. We set up camp on a slope above the cave entrance, and we slept in Hennessey Hammocks that are built for the tropics, and are sort of like hanging tents. (Photo by Alanna Maltby)

Arrived in Port Moresby to torrential rains. I am just not used to this sort of rain in San Francisco – the steamy heat and huge water dump was refreshing, but made it difficult to sleep (and the jetlag didn’t help either)

On the 29th, we moved our “kit” to the Airlines PNG hangar to be loaded on a chartered Dash 8 cargo plane. We literally packed the plane with cameras, electronics, and research equipment for the field. Then our team (15 or so of us) went to the passenger hangar to catch our flight to Moro on another, regularly scheduled Dash 8.

The flight took up northeastward from Port Moresby along the coast, but the ground was obscured by cloud cover until we neared Moro on the northern end of Lake Kutubu. When we were dropping down for our landing, we could see the broken limestone karst country that the rainforest grows on. Streams appear and disappear into caves and crevasses, and the landscape is quite rugged.

Here is the Moro “airport” where we arrived, and then proceeded to sit and have lunch under an awning. We waited for a couple hours for the cloud cover to lift enough for us to squirt our helicopters between the treetops and the low rainclouds.

When our opportunity appeared, we loaded up the first chopper, and sent the film crew ahead.

The scientific team loaded onto a 212 helicopter with some of our kit. The chopper landed us on the small pebbly riverbank directly below our camp (Nunupi #2 Base Camp).

The rest of our kit was shuttled in by sling under two 212′s that flew back and forth between the nearby village of Fogomai’u and our beach (“Croc beach”). It took several flights to move all of the equipment, and it took most of the afternoon to carry the boxes and bags one by one up to the camp.

And the camera teams are always working, always shooting whatever was going on. No matter how mundane it seemed to us, all of these tasks are just part of being in the field in Papua New Guinea.

When we arrived, the camp was already built by an advance team and ready to receive us. Here is the scientific lab space, with a bench for each of us. Most of us set up our “labs” here even before we set up our sleeping space, and we were eager to start working.

Here is Allen Allison from the Bishop Museum in front of the herpetology lab.

With all of the rain, paths quickly turn to mud, and the camp can get extremely messy. So boardwalks were made with rough hewn planks and nailed together. Here is the walkway from the beach up to the lower camp, where the local Fogomai’u workers had their mess, sleeping quarters, and equipment store.

Here is the team mess, for the scientific staff and the film crew. The food has been excellent – we have an Australian cook (Tony) – with access to a nice cooking range and even a meat freezer. Even though we are extremely remote, our existence was relatively posh compared to my typical field camp.

Here is the production lab. This lab is totally wired with power, video editing tables, hot-dry boxes for storing equipment, all so that the film crew can keep their cameras going. Note that this is the only building with a completely raised floor, as they have a lot of very expensive top-of-the-line video and sound equipment that need special care and attention.

We flew in by chopper two and a half days ago, over some of the most rugged
country I’ve ever seen. The base rock here is uplifted limestone, and it
has worn away into a network of sinkholes, caves, and washes that
chaotically fill the landscape. We’ve worked now for two days, catching
birds and bats, and we’ve seen some amazing animals ‹ including the little
red King Bird of Paradise ‹ a bird that I think is the most drop-dead
gorgeous animal here in Papua New Guinea.

The BBC crew is amazing. Everyone is really cool and fun to work with, and
they are all great photographers and camera people. They have so much
enthusiasm for the animals we are working with and studying, and I think
that they are doing an excellent job of collecting stories about the land
and people here. Our camp is amazing too – it is run like a small village.
Despite our extremely remote location along the Hegigio River and the
surrounding karst, we have a mess tent, a store, a production lab, a science
lab, showers, three full (huge) sleeping quarters, and infirmary, and at
least three more houses for the work staff, generators, water pumps.

We currently have ten mist nets up and catching birds and bats. The DNA and
viral samples are coming in nicely. Most of the birds are fairly common
species, but this gives us good samples for estimate disease prevalences for
these species. And, even though the species are common, our other work
suggests that many of these isolated populations are genetically distinct.
And so far, we have caught a few of the species that we are working with in
our other studies, so these samples will be very valuable.

Ahhh, Papua New Guinea…

In New Guinea, when you ask someone how far is it to the village or to the other side of the mountain, they say, “ino longwe, tupela haua tasol” or “not a long-way, just a couple hours.” Often it ends up taking several days to get there. Right now I can feel my distance to PNG – the other side of the world – in days or even hours. And I’m starting to panic that I’ll be ready to leave on time.

This trip is a special one. It’s been nearly three years since my last visit, and apart from my home, PNG is my favorite place. The forests are beautiful and wild, the local people are lovely and alive, the animals are strange and fantastic. PNG is home to the world’s largest butterflies and walking sticks, poisonous bird species, and forests that pulsate with the sound of insects and birds.

In the next 20 days, I will be traveling to the limestone karst country below Mt. Bosavi in Southern Highlands Province. Don’t be fooled by the province name; we will be well out of the mountains and in the steamy-hot lowlands. This is rugged landscape strewn with jagged uplifted limestone and streams that disappear underground and appear again somewhere else. BBC has assembled a team of scientists – me to study birds from California Academy of Sciences, and along with colleagues from Smithsonian, Bishop Museum, Oxford University, PNG Institute of Biological Research, and other institutions, we will study mammals, insects, bats, plants, etc. We will be surveying the area’s life and highlighting some of the gems that New Guinea has to offer…

Here’s another GoogleEarth image of PNG showing the location Fogoma’iu village near our study site.

We’ll be flying from the capital of Port Moresby by a twin-engine “Dash 8″ to a small town along Lake Kutubu, and then flying in an even smaller “Twin Otter” to the jungle grass-strip at Fogoma’iu. From there, we will either float down the river to our bush camp, or if the river is too swollen from rain, we’ll shuttle in on helicopters.

You can see the thick green lowlands around Fogoma’iu, with the flanks of Mt. Bosavi in the lower-left-hand corner of the screenshot. The white line is 5 miles long for scale.

Once there, I’ll focus on birds. Pitohuis are my favorite species: jay-sized birds that carry a potent neurotoxin in their skin and feathers. I’ve studied them for years, and on this trip, we hope to study a little beetle in the genus Choresine that pitohuis eat to get their poisons. Where the Choresine beetles get their toxins is anyone’s guess. I’ll also study how cassowaries respond to low-frequency calls. Cassowaries are among the largest birds living in the world today – they are flightless ancient relatives of emus and ostriches. In New Guinea, the cassowaries send deep booming sounds into the forest – presumably to communicate with each other. The Macaulay Library of Sounds at Cornell University gave me 9 high-quality recordings to use in these experiments – thanks Tammy and Greg!

Here is a photo of Choresine pulchra (Pic), the toxic “nanisani” beetle, next to the Hooded Pitohui, Pitohui dichrous. Both carry potent neurotoxins, and presumably the pitohui picks up toxins from eating the beetles.

One last project that I am really excited about… Our colleagues (Joe DeRisi and his lab) at University of California San Francisco have engineered a DNA chip that screens for all known virus types, and can potentially help discover new viruses. We will be working with Joe’s lab to see what old and new diseases are affecting wild birds on the island of New Guinea. This is important work, as many emerging diseases originate in wild places like New Guinea and jump to humans where people and wild animals come together. It’s also important because wildlife on isolated islands can be devastated by the introduction of exotic diseases, so getting baseline data in wild places like New Guinea will help us to monitor pathogens in the region. Joe and his lab have been very generous and have provided us with most of the supplies we need to test the birds.

Here’s some nice lowland hill forest not far from the area we’re headed…

For more information about my work at California Academy of Sciences, you can check out some of my older blogs or click on my home page. You can read about the department’s collections here.

To learn more about Papua New Guinea – stay tuned. I’ll try to blog whenever I can from the BBC camp. For now, I have to start packing…