Discover the New World of Birding

New Guinea is the Centre of bird diversity in Australia and New Guinea combined, plus nearby islands. Here lives one of the world’s four great tropical avifauna, separate in its history and evolution from those of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The region is famous for being home to a rich and distinctive humid forest avifauna characterized by cassowaries, megapodes, pigeons, parrots, cuckoos, kingfishers, owlet-nightjars, and especially the oscine passerines or songbirds. The latter include hundreds of small insectivores belonging to numerous families centered on the region, and most renowned of all, the birds of Paradise and Bowerbirds.

The uniqueness of the ancient passerine lineages that evolved in the region are only now coming to light with detailed molecular systematic studies that have recently elevated seven New Guinean endemic songbird lineages to full familial status – the satinbirds, typical berrypeckers, painted berrypeckers, berry hunters, ploughbills, ifrits, and melampittas. These relatively obscure montane forest denizens are fascinating, but overshadowed by the more prodigious songbird lineages that also apparently evolved in New Guinea only to expand out to the forestlands of Australia, Oceania, and Asia.

The volume treats all species of birds known to occur within the New Guinea Region as defined by Mayr (1941), comprising the huge equatorial island of New Guinea and its numerous closely associated satellite islands and island groups. New Guinea now includes detailed accounts of 779 bird species. Papua New Guinea has 365 species (or 59%) endemic to the region, meaning they are found nowhere else in the world.

To see some of these endemic species, contact Daniel Wakra, a famous local birding guide expert, for more detailed information, itinerary, and cost. Our tour centers around locating a fabulous variety of birds-of-paradise, among them some of the most highly prized birds on Earth: King-of-Saxony, Twelve-wired, Raggiana, Blue birds-of-paradise, the elegant Ribbon-tailed Astrapia, the huge Black Sicklebill, and many more.

There are 43 known species of Bird of Paradise on our planet, 38 of these are found in Papua New Guinea. These virtually untouched forests come alive with the sights and sounds of fruit doves, fig parrots, fairywrens, whistlers, paradise kingfishers, jewel-babblers, honeyeaters, berrypeckers, and bowerbirds, whilst more than twenty species of dazzling birds-of-paradise display their iridescent colors and elaborate plumes in one of the most astonishing exhibits of the natural world.