National Parks Conservation Association

Yet the real purpose of the trip succeeded completely: to indulge my thirst for adventure and bird-watching in one of the wildest remaining parts of the world. What I saw then of New Guinea's fabulous birds, including its bowerbirds and birds of paradise, led me to develop a parallel second career in bird ecology, evolution, and biogeography. Since then, I have returned to New Guinea and the neighbouring Pacific islands a dozen times to pursue my bird research. I found it hard to work in New Guinea amid the accelerating destruction of the birds and forests that I loved, without getting involved in conservation biology. So I began to combine my academic research with practical work as a consultant for governments, by applying what I knew about animal distributions to designing national park systems and surveying their proposed national parks. It was also hard to work in New Guinea, where languages replace each other every twenty miles, and where learning bird names in each local language proved to be the key to tapping New Guineans' encyclopedic knowledge of their birds, without returning to my earlier interest in languages ...»