Indonesia Update 8: Raja Ampat and Sorong
As Ethan made his way westwards he once again arrived in the city of Sorong but this time he stopped long enough to make a few excursions into the countryside and the island of Waigeo and entered a pasadise of sweet birds.
Ethan encountered two of these pouched monstrosities while he was looking for Frogmouths at night but the other one was too busy to be photographed on account of being engaged in a ferocious battle with a Fruit Bat. (Ethan was cheering on the Fruit Bat because he is Team Placenta for life.)
Ethan saw not just one but two new Pittas although they where both just slight variations of one’s he’d already seen. On the left is the Papuan Pitta and on the right is the Eastern Hooded Pitta which didn’t cooperate at the hide which made things personal and forced Ethan to track it down while it slept.
Here are a couple of gnarly pigeons that didn’t like having their pictures taken. On the left is the very infrequently seen Cinnamon Ground-Dove and on the right is Ethan’s 2500th bird seen, the Western Crowned-Pigeon.
When Ethan got bored of looking for normal birds or just happened to be in a duck-y area, he would check for Radjah Shelducks and to his mild surprise he actually found a couple in a drainage canal.
It feels like just yesterday that Ethan got his first Brown Honeyeater on Bali and now he has over 50 members of this Australasian superfamily including, from left to right, the kind of nasty Spotted Honeyeater, the mangrove-dwelling Brown-Backed Honeyeater, and the supertramp Olive Honeyeater.
After seeing and hearing countless Blyth’s Hornbills buzzing overhead week after week, Ethan thought it was kind of cool to finally see one up close at eye level.
On the left it the Waigeo Shrikethrush which Ethan appreciated getting for the name since the Waigeo Brushturkey wasn’t doable. On the left is the Yellow-Bellied Boatbill which completed another family for Ethan.
Ethan was surprised at how tiny this Rufous-Breasted Kookaburra as his only other experience with the genus had been with the Laughing Kookaburra. At least this one is more colorful.
This is one of the most extreme pictures Ethan has taken, both for the subject and the conditions. He crossed paths with this Northern Cassowary, surely one of nature’s most XTREME birds, in the dense jungle just after sunrise. Normally Ethan would let a bird go in this light level but that just wasn’t an option in this case so he dropped his shutter speed down to 1/30, let his ISO max out, and manually focused on the lumbering beast since it was too dark for his camera’s autofocus to function. In one of the brief moments that the creature more or less in the open, he somehow managed to line everything up and at least somewhat document his encounter with the deadliest bird since the Haast’s Eagle.
Significantly smaller but no less XTREME was this Streak-Headed Munia, a fairly rare New Guinea endemic that was scared away by a car before Ethan could photograph it on his first two encounters before he finally got it on this third try.
Ethan achieved the Fig-Parrot trifecta including the elusive Bird’s Head endemic Blue-Fronted Fig-Parrot on the left and the Double-Eyed Fig-Parrot on the right which probably has the worst thought out name of any species alive or dead. First of all, calling a bird double-eyed is quite dumb because all birds are double eyed. Presumably they where attempting to refer to a second pair of false eyes but these don’t appear to be be obvious on this or any any other subspecies of the bird and even if they were they should have been called Quadruple-Eyed Fig-Parrots like a Four-Eyed Fish. But it gets even worse. Their genus, Cyclopsitta, means Cyclops Parrot which would suggest only a single eye which also seems to have little basis in the birds form or pattern. Neither Ethan nor I have any idea what was going on with the naming of this one but someone clearly messed up.
Ethan didn’t get any new Scops-Owls but he did manage to get a couple of new Ninox owls including this Papuan Boonbook.
Okay. We have another couple of poorly named birds here and this time it was the fault of Linnaeus who somewhat inexplicably gave the name Paradisaea regia, called the King Bird-Of-Pasadise in English, to the bird on the left despite it being the smallest Bird-Of-Pasadise and having no particularly regal qualities to speak of. This left the door open for consumptive French zoologist François-Marie Daudin to name the bird on the left Paradisaea rubra, naturally called in English the Red Bird-Of-Pasadise, despite it being only slightly more red than your average BOP. Disgraceful!
Instead of doing the typical dance of the other BOPs in the display tree this Lesser Bird-Of-Pasadise just did a bunch of goofy somersaults which failed to attract the ladies but where easier for Ethan to photograph.
The Twelve-Wire Bird-Of-Pasadise is one of the more surreal birds Ethan has seen. Ethan’s bird addiction has progressed to the point where he no longer experiences joy from watching birds, only a momentary feeling of relief at not having missed one and then a growing sense of urgency to find the next target but watching this guy do his display actually seemed made Ethan feel the smallest tinge of happiness again.
The Wilson’s Bird-Of-Pasadise is another excellent bird. Just look at all those primary colors, the exposed brain, and the curly tail. This bird has truly achieved the peak of what it is possible for a bird to become.
With both his camera and body both hanging on by a thread and his photo storage filled to the brim, it is now time for Ethan to depart West Papua and continue his journey back to Jakarta. His destination beyond there is a mystery, at least to me, but if I had to guess I would say there will probably be birds there.