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A Fabled Place: New Guinea mountains rich with undiscovered natural wonders
Photos Courtesy of Bruce Beehler
Bruce Beehler, who will speak at Wake Forest next week, took an expedition
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Published: November 6, 2008
Updated: 11/05/2008 08:10 pm
Bruce Beehler stood surrounded by gnats, mosquitoes, moths and lightning bugs, speaking into a satellite phone from an isolated hamlet on the island of New Guinea, two and a half degrees south of the equator.
Between sentences, some lost and garbled into the stratosphere, the throbbing sounds of a jungle at night pulsed through the phone, into my florescent-lit office in downtown Winston-Salem.
It started to rain. Beehler moved under shelter, making a scratchy line even more fragile.
"I'm headed off tomorrow into the bush," he said. "I'm going to try to get as high as I can by foot in the mountains."
Beehler, an ornithologist and conservationist, will speak next Thursday at Wake Forest University as part of the university's "Voices of Our Time" guest-speaker series. Beehler is a vice president at Conservation International, an organization that promotes biodiversity and conservation around the world. He is in charge of the group's efforts in Indonesia and the Pacific Islands.
"They're one of major thought leaders in conversation efforts," said Miles Silman, a biology professor at Wake Forest. "Basically they have the equivalent of a good university's research department."
Conservation International calls New Guinea a "high-biodiversity wilderness area," one of just three tropical ones on the planet. The other two are the Congo and the Amazon. The western half of the island belongs to Indonesia and is divided into Papua and West Papua. The eastern side is the mainland of the country of Papua New Guinea.
Culturally and biologically, the island is one of the most diverse places on Earth. Five to ten percent of the Earth's species live on New Guinea, although the island is just a fraction of the Earth's land.
Beehler wrote his doctoral dissertation at Princeton University on birds of paradise in New Guinea. Now, he visits the island about twice a year, dividing his time between conservation efforts -- lobbying, educating and working with governments to set up protected areas -- and research. "It's a fabled place because of the people, the birdlife," Beehler said. "It's a home away from home, really. It's a remarkable change from the East Coast of the U.S. It's a purging of our material culture here -- no cars, no highways, no roads, not much of anything here except people and the houses they've built from materials in the forest."
Beehler is perhaps best known for his 2005 expedition to the Foja Mountains, a remote range in northwestern New Guinea and part of the Mamberamo Basin, the largest unbroken swath of forest in the Asia Pacific region. The trip was his first to the mountains, but it was a place that he had long dreamed of exploring. In 2005 he got his wish, leading a two-week expedition of 11 scientists from the U.S., Australia and Indonesia. Within minutes of being dropped by a helicopter, Beehler and the other scientists started to uncover new species of plants, butterflies, frogs, mammals and more, about 70 in total during their expedition, Beehler said, including a new bird, the wattled smoky honeyeater.
Exploring the moss-covered, muddy rain forest, Beehler didn't take off his rubber boots the entire trip, except to sleep.
In this Internet age, it's hard to fathom that there are places on the planet that have never had great influence from humans. But they exist. And the Fojas are one of those places.
"For a field biologist, nothing is remotely as exciting as being in a new place where there may be undiscovered species," Beehler wrote in his 2008 book, Lost Worlds. "Identifying a new species is a bit like establishing an athletic record, one that cannot subsequently be broken. The scientist who describes a new species gets to give the species its name, and the scientist's own name is forever allied to that new species -- a little piece of immortality. And it is not just finding new species. It is learning the song of a bird for the first time, seeing for the first time some bizarre animal behavior, admiring a rainbow over a lost lake where no scientist has ever camped, being out at the very edge. It is being alive in every sense."
When he's not on the other side of the world, Beehler, 57, lives in Bethesda, Md. His daughter, Grace, is a student at Wake Forest.
On this most recent trip, Beehler planned to head into the Foja Mountains on foot for nine days with six leaders from the nearby village of Kwerba, following a river, then a mountain ridge as the team made clearings for a helicopter to land safely during a coming expedition. It's an isolated, pristine area without trails, a place that natives know more from stories passed down from their grandparents than from much personal contact. They don't go into the mountains much because travel is difficult, and they hunt what they need around Kwerba.
"They have a sense of mountains that are right next to them, but they never go to them," he said.
Beehler calls naturalism "sort of an old-fashioned idea, sort of Victorian, because there aren't a lot of places that are undiscovered anymore. It's basically going out and counting God's creation. It's not high- powered science. It's just the opposite."
Beehler's talk at Wake Forest will include audio recordings, video and photos from his New Guinea expeditions and discoveries. He will also give two lectures during WFU's annual biology symposium, a gathering of biologists from North and South Carolina colleges, which will take place Nov. 14 and 15.
Silman, who researches the biodiversity of the Andes and the Amazon, said that Beehler's experiences and work are important given the recent national and international direction of conversation about clean energy.
Even if climate change came to a halt tomorrow, humans would still have an impact on species' extinction -- and we haven't found them all yet, Silman said.
"We're still finding new species. It's just plain cool to see these stunning areas of the planet. It's uplifting. People go to the zoo and they see animals and what people don't understand is there are still these wild areas."
In Lost Worlds, Beehler makes a case for financing biological exploration on Earth over expensive expeditions to Mars and other planets.
"Most people today think of the world as mapped and scrutinized and easily visited on Google Earth," he writes. "We have an unknown earth right here in the isolated mountain ranges like the Fojas…."
By exploring the Fojas, Beehler acknowledges that he can't help but change them, too. A return expedition in 2007 included a television crew from 60 Minutes and a photographer from National Geographic magazine, further publicizing the area.
"We're out there measuring," he said. "We're putting it on the map where it wasn't before. So we will change it. We'll change the local people's conception of it … really the change is that you lose that sense of wonder of a place. You take that away. And that's perhaps a little bit sad for people who love the idea of wilderness and the unknown."
The trade-off is that we know a little more about our own planet.
Some scientists estimate that just a 10th of Earth's species have been discovered. "It's a bit off-putting," said Beehler. "So there is still a lot of work to do.
"It makes our life richer," he added.
"If we just focus on what we need to survive, we're just animals.
"It's what makes us human really, the quest for the known."
Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
■ Bruce Beehler will speak next Thursday at 7 p.m. at Wake Forest University's Wait Chapel. The talk is free and open to the public.
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