That’s the female.
And there he goes.
The land of the birds-of-paradise is
isolated at many levels, and that’s
one of the important reasons why
thirty-nine species have evolved to be so different.
Getting to the difficult to reach places,
had to go to so many different mountain ranges….
so many different islands.
It’s all very logistically challenging, and once you’re there
you have to know enough about the birds
to be able to find them.
And once you find them, you have to have an enormous amount of
patience to be able to be in the right place at the right time.
The work really isn’t that glamorous.
It involves hours and hours of just sitting and waiting and doing nothing other than
having your blood sucked by leeches and mosquitos.
Which way is the trail?
I don’t know, where’s the trail?
No matter where we go, we end up having to hire a whole team of people to porter our
gear to the site where we’re going to work more remotely in the forest.
Sometimes the whole village, the men, the women,
even some of the kids, are carrying boots and shovels.
Okay, thank you very much.
There’s absolutely no way we could even do the work that we do in New Guinea
without working with the local people.
These people are
experts in their homeland.
They know where the resources are; they know where different kinds of forests are.
They often know where the birds that we’re after are.
While I’m sitting in a blind
trying to photograph one species, I’m always aware that I’m just working on one particular bird.
Ed is usually spending his time either
at other sites observing and documenting or scouting, trying to find
new places for both of us to work.
It’s really a division of labor.
He’s doing the thing that he’s a specialist at, that’s climbing the trees and getting
the photographs in the canopy.
And I'm doing the thing I’m a specialist at, and that’s
finding other birds, finding other individuals of different species and deciding
where we’re going to work next.
Everyday we’re out there
doing the things that we’re both the best at.
That’s why our partnership works.
Well, it’s better than from my angle.
At least you’re looking down. Well, that’s one of another
advantage of having two different angles because I’m looking up like that.
I have this, like, bright sunny patch like that right in the background right now.
A fundamental motivation for our work is scientifically driven.
It’s not simply to
have beautiful images or
images that can be used to tell the stories we’re telling.
But for us it’s also an opportunity to understand
more about
these birds and what they do and
how they’ve evolved and how they’ve come to be.
Everybody out there, whether they’re scientists or not,
they crave that same kind of feeling.
Knowing that things exist that they didn’t know about and getting to experience it for the first time.
That's one of the most incredible things about the birds-of-paradise.
They are an example of that extraordinary element of our planet’s natural heritage
that offers so many rewards for discovery and so many opportunities
to see things that haven’t been seen before.
The extreme isolation of this region has helped to shape
the diverse evolution of these birds.
But that same isolation has made it really difficult for scientists to study them.
Ed and I see our work as a way to make what was unknown, known.
With the birds-of-paradise, there’s always something more to discover.
Were you watching when they flew over there? I was.
So what was your interpretation? They didn't get anywhere near the spike structures underneath them...