Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise:"The bird--known as Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise--had been collected only once in the wild since its discovery more than a century ago. Its precise home range was unknown until now."
Source: National Geographic
If you think the age of great land exploration is over, that the discovery of new species is over, well, you're mistaken. Doughty, determined scientists have just discovered a "Lost World" in a remote Papua rainforest.
A bird-of-paradise lost, and now found
A recent expedition to a remote, rarely visited rainforest unveiled likely new species of mammals, birds, amphibians, insects and more. Exciting discoveries included a possibly never-before-known monotreme (egg-laying mammal), a possibly brand-new bird, a re-encounter with Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise (previously described by hunters in the 19th-century and of which no photographs are known to exist), a tree-kangaroo hunted to the brink of extinction elsewhere, 20 frog species, four buterfly species and five previously unknown palms. And probably more to come.
(indeed, more...)
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An Exciting Rediscovery: Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise
Credit: Conservation International, Bruce Beehler | Another "Lost" Avian: the Golden-fronted Bowerbird
Credit: Stephen Richards | A Brand-new Bird Species: the first new avian species found in New Guinea in over than 60 years.
Credit: Conservation International, Bruce Beehler |
A trek into Eden
Scientist Bruce Beehler recently co-led an expeditionary trip to the Foja Mountains in Papua. He and an 11-member scientist team (largely from Indonesian Institute of Science, LIPI) trekked for one month in Asia's largest remaining, nearly untouched rainforest. This area is rarely visited, has not a single road and has legal status as a wildlife sanctuary. The group had to get six permits before they could visit this exceedingly remote haven, an area so secluded that even indigenous peoples do not go there. This area in the Foja Mountains comprises 740,000 acres of old-growth tropical forest that, because they are never visted by humans (even for game, for game is abundant closer to the villages) that one can see what life might be like, how much of it is in abundance, without the presence of the human footprint.
"The tiny frog measures a mere 0.6 inch (14 millimeters) long and was detected only when it produced a soft call from among leaves on the steepest part of the forest floor."
Source: National Geographic
What the island was like 50,000 years ago
Stephen Richards of the South Australia Museum reported that this discovery enabled them to see what the island "was like 50,000 years ago, because there's been no hunting, no impact of transport or anything like that."
The Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise was first described in 1897 by the German ornithologist Otto Kleinschmidt from wildlife skins in the private museum of Hans von Berlepsch. The striking black bird with metallic plumage along its throat and white flank plumes was named for the curious wires that extend from its head in place of a crest. It appeared to originate in northern New Guinea, but a precise location of the bird's habitat was unknown.
...
At least a dozen attempts were made to find the two mysterious birds [Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise and the Golden-fronted Bowerbird] the over the next 80 years. Prominent scientists were repeatedly unsuccessful, exhausting time and resources to scour the mountain ranges of Earth's second largest island - a scientific "needle in a haystack" scenario. Then in the late 1970s, scientists turned their attention to the Foja Mountains.
"The Fojas were a promised land to biologists in search of the unknown," says Beehler. "The human population there is so small, scattered, and confined that the core forest block today is apparently entirely free of human influence. In our two weeks ranging out in all directions from the camp, our team never encountered any evidence of humankind - present or past. It was a wild land given over to wildlife."
Source: Conservation International
"In late 2005 scientists on the island of New Guinea took this first ever photo of the golden-fronted bowerbird, a bird known to exist since the 1890s but whose precise home was unknown until the 1980s."
Source: National Geographic
A Warning
The era of great land exploration is not quite over. There are indeed many, many more species -- flora and fauna -- to discover.
But these discoveries have little value if we don't also act responsibly and make a vow to protect them.
How many more humans do we need on the planet? How many more of them need wide-screen televisions? Surely there are enough of us already. If we want to keep jewels like the Foja Mountains intact, we have to admit that they have value other than as "resources."