The Kingdom of Rarities Read Online Free PDF Page B

for short. The political division obscures a common geography, similar rain forests, and shared cultures. No other large tropical island is so mountainous, and the isolation created by its cordilleras, or mountain chains, has had a profound effect not only on the evolution of animal and plant life but also on human communication. Nearly one-fourth of all spoken languages on Earth are known only in New Guinea (about 1,100 true languages, not including dialects), and most are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Languages, like birds of paradise or tree kangaroos, can also be labeled as endemic to a place. And perhaps the same forces—geologic, geographic, and evolutionary—that resulted in so many tongues spoken by so few people in this land might be related to why so many species of widely different lineages occupy such narrow ranges: a prime element of rarity.
    In the late summer of 2005, I received an excited message from Bruce that he would have to bow out of a birding trip we had planned in Maryland. “I can’t believe it,” he wrote. “After twenty-five years of trying, I have just been granted permission to bring a small research team into the Foja Mountains!” More than twenty years of guerilla warfare in Papua Province had prevented any field expeditions in this region. When Papua’s political troubles subsided in 2003, Bruce joined herpetologist Stephen Richards of the South Australian Museum to try once more. Two years later, in October 2005, villagers of the Kwerba and Papasena clans granted Bruce and his group permission to enter their homeland. It would turn out to yield a wonderful collection of naturally engendered rarities.
    If New Guinea is the ultimate destination for field biologists, within it the Fojas loom as the pinnacles of desire. The Foja Mountainswere reportedly so inaccessible that humans had never settled there. I had come to doubt whether places such as the Fojas still existed, geographic outliers with no history of interlopers—gold miners, oil drillers, religious zealots, or armed guerillas—either seeking their fortune or looking for an escape from modern society.
    The purpose of Bruce’s expedition was to survey the biota and to find species new to science and others poorly known that he thought might be inhabiting this isolated range. The Fojas sit in the heart of Papua Province, and their summits reach 2,200 meters above sea level. The surrounding 7,500 square kilometers, lightly inhabited by jungle dwellers, lack roads. Taken together, the vast landscape stands as the largest expanse of pristine forest in the tropical Pacific.
    The Fojas have a reputation for repelling outsiders. The legendary secretary of the Smithsonian Institution S. Dillon Ripley, for whom Bruce had worked, tried to approach them from the north in 1960. He failed because the rivers were not navigable. In the late 1970s, both Bruce and Jared Diamond, a noted New Guinea bird expert long before penning his best-selling
Guns, Germs, and Steel
, raced to explore them. Diamond, through helicopter and grit, arrived first in 1979. He found a species that had eluded birders for seven decades, the “lost” golden-fronted bowerbird, and returned home to bask in ornithological glory. His find earned extensive press coverage, and his technical paper reporting the rediscovery of the bowerbird enlivened the cover article in
Science
.
    Bruce believed that the Fojas might hold many species new to science as well as others that science had forgotten, the so-called lost species. Although they had not been declared extinct, these “lost” species had not been seen in decades, a category of rarity but a half step from oblivion. To help them, Bruce and Steve Richards assembled a team of crack naturalists who specialized in different taxa—birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, butterflies, other insects, plants—along with several Papuan biology students. They would be guided