On the Trail of Elusive Bird of Paradise

A false dawn edges the ghostly outline of an island as four black inflatable boats glide across the glassy surface of an inland sea. The drivers, leaders of a U.S.-based tour, signal each other with flashlights.

One boat speeds up to a small dock while the others wait in the humid air, pungent with the decay of a nearby mangrove swamp. The destination: Warsamdin, a village on the small island of Waigeo.

Riding in the three other boats are 30 birding enthusiasts, binoculars at the ready. Their goal: to add to their lists the red bird of paradise, a stunningly gorgeous, multicolored bird that lives on Waigeo.

A light flashes from the shore, giving the tourists permission to land. The birders pile out of their boats and follow their leaders up a narrow, muddy path that disappears steeply into jungle foliage.

They assume that the red bird of paradise hides from people who threaten its life and habitat. In this faraway village, the assumption is erroneous.

Indonesia, the world’s fifth most populous nation, has 185 million people representing 300 different ethnic groups and speaking some 365 local dialects. They live on about 13,670 islands stretching across more than 3,100 miles of water.

Warsamdin is one of hundreds of tiny eastern Indonesian villages that remain nearly untouched by modern civilization. Their residents, unlike western Indonesians, see few white people.

Their ways are simple. “Although they survive at sometimes below subsistence level, their lives are in some ways far richer than ours,” Lorne Blair said.

“They cannot afford any of the modern packaged and plastic goodies that have polluted the streams and shorelines of most other Indonesian villages,” said Blair, a British filmmaker, author, explorer and a leader of the tour group.

Western clothes have replaced bark cloth for the Waigeo islanders, who live in thatched-roof huts built on stilts.

They are without electricity or a sewage system, telephones or telegraph, regular mail service, a doctor and a store. They have no guns to kill the fat tropical pigeons, hornbills, screaming parrots, Australian sacred ibises and white cockatoos that fly overhead. And their village is still too remote for them to trap tropical birds for the illegal trade that has decimated species on other Indonesian islands.

One wide path runs between two rows of homes and fades away out in the jungle. Women wash clothes in a stream. Men carve canoes out of tree trunks.

Waigeo men do not have motors for their prahus, the same type of small outrigger canoes that their Melanesian ancestors used to sail across oceans for thousands of years.

They barter with traders who travel by small motor boats to their dock every few weeks. They exchange salted fish, sago leaf, sea cucumber and pearl shells for clothes, plastic rope, batteries, knives and lamp oil.

The islanders hunt wild pigs and grow cassava and sweet potatoes in a slash-and-burn system that lets fields that have been used for three years lie fallow for 20 years.

Unlike the majority in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, the Waigeo people and those on several other islands are Protestants. Blended with their Protestantism is animism. In the cemetery, crosses on graves share space with reddish-purple plants meant to deter evil spirits.

Malaria is a problem, the villagers say. They have no quinine, and the government is supposed to spray the mosquitoes once a year. A doctor, usually a government-educated physician who must work in these remote villages for three years, makes an annual visit to augment the work of the midwives, who double as village trance-healers.

While the birders scramble through the jungle in pursuit of their elusive quest, the ship’s doctor offers villagers a free clinic. The ship’s staff presents a case of cold soft drinks--a special treat on a hot equatorial island with no refrigeration--and gifts from the passengers, such as pens and paper. Blair gives clove cigarettes to the island men who gather silently around him.

Suddenly a male red bird of paradise flies over the village. The islanders ignore it, despite its eye-arresting mix of green, yellow, brown and crimson feathers.

Running hard behind its flight path is one of the three birding leaders. “Have you seen my group?” he shouted. “The red bird of paradise is flying right over us!”

Too late. The bird that mingled comfortably with the residents of Warsamdin flies away just as the birders emerge from the jungle--muddy, exhausted and unable to write an invaluable new entry into their life books.