Sy Montgomery - The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea

For Joel Glick S.M.

For our Papuan field assistants N.B.

I T FEELS LIKE WEVE WALKED INTO A LIVING FAIRY TALE. O UR HEADS ARE LITERALLY IN THE CLOUDS. T HOUGH WERE JUST A FEW DEGREES SOUTH OF THE EQUATOR, WERE bathed in cool mist. Were 10,000 feet up in the mountains. Here, the trees are cloaked in clouds. The ground is carpeted with thick green moss. In the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea, ferns grow into treestrees like those the dinosaurs knew. Moss and ferns, vines and orchids, hang from branches like the beards of wise old wizards.

In a place like this, we half expect a hobbit or a troll to show up. But its better than that. The animals who really do live here are even more fantasticand directly above us is one of them.

This is incredible!

Lisa Dabek, forty-five, cant help but exclaim each time she sees one in the wild. Shes the scientific leader of our research team, and shes fixed her binoculars on one of the rarest, strangest, and least understood creatures on the planet. More than eighty feet above her, high in one of the tall, ancient trees, a kangaroo is looking down at us.

A kangaroo in a tree?

Thats just what Lisa thought when she met her first tree kangaroo about twenty years ago.

The encounter took place at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. Lisa was a graduate student in animal behavior. She had never heard of a tree kangaroo before. But meeting one changed her life.

It looked like a big stuffed animal! she remembers. Or something that Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up. Impossibly soft, with a rounded face, button eyes, pink nose, pert upright ears and a long thick tail, it was about the size of a small dog or an overweight cat, with plush brown and golden fur.

Lisa scans the canopy for tree kangaroos.

Matschies tree kangaroo is one of the worlds rarest and most elusive mammals.

There were two of themtwo mothers with tiny babies concealed in their pouches. They were as strange as they were adorable.

They were like monkeys up in the treesbut they werent monkeys, she recalls. They looked a little like bearsbut they werent bears. And then they had a pouch for their babiesa totally different thing from most other mammals.

What she was looking at thenand what were seeing today above us in the treewas a Matschies (MATCH-eez) tree kangaroo. Its one of ten kinds of tree kangaroos on the planet. I was totally intrigued, Lisa said. I fell completely in love with these animals.

Lisa learned at the zoo that the Matschies tree kangaroo is among the rarest creatures on earthand getting rarer. As people cut down the cloud forest and killed more and more kangaroos, the species was disappearing.

She decided to do something about it.

And thats whats brought Lisa and us, a team of scientists and volunteers shes gathered from three continents to help her, on this quest to a remote and magical forest in the clouds. Weve come to try to learn the secrets of these rare creatures. What do they eat? How many are left? What do they need to survive? We hope to find out the answersbefore its too late.

The Matschies live in a lost world, on a Stone Age island, in a land that time forgot. Thats how people still describe New Guinea. Its the second-largest island on Earth. Only one island (Greenland) is bigger. Only the Amazon has more tropical rainforest. But New Guinea has many other different habitats for animals to live in besides tropical rainforestfrom seashores to coral reefs to glaciers to cloud forests.

New Guinea was mostly unexplored by outsiders until the middle of the twentieth century. And for good reason: the place is full of tangled jungles, steep mountains, erupting volcanoes, dangerous mudslides, aggressive crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and tropical diseases. The few explorers who survived expeditions there noted another hazard: The local people sometimes had newcomers for dinnerliterally. Headhunting cannibal tribes sometimes ate people clothes and allexcept for their shoes. (They gave the shoes to their pigs to eat, just as dogs eat rawhide chews.)

The feathers and skin of the pitohui contain a poison similar to that found in poison dart frogs of South America. Predators who try to eat a pitohui get sickand arent likely to try it again.

Things have changed. Headhunting fell out of fashion. Its thought that nobody eats people there anymore. But still, especially on the eastern half of the islandthe nation known as Papua New Guineafew roads mar the wilderness. Ancient forests remain unexplored. New species are still being found.

Here youll find birds that grow as tall as a man. Cassowaries remind you of dinosaurs. They sport tall helmets of bone growing up from their blue and black heads. Long, skinny black feathers hang from their bodies like hair. Because they have only tiny stumps for wings, cassowaries cant fly. But they sure can fight! They can leap into the air and slash at their enemies with claws as sharp as razors. Other birdslike the pitohui (PIT-oh-whee)have poisonous feathers. And still others are so beautiful, they are called birds of paradise.

Strange animals abound. The triok (TREE-okk) is a beautiful black and white striped possum with a pink nose and huge black eyes. The fourth finger on each hand is more than twice as long as the othersall the better to fish grubs from holes in rotting trees.

The echidna (eee-KID-nah) is a spine-covered, worm-eating mammal who lays eggs instead of giving birth to live babies. The dorcopsis (door-COP-sis) is a fat little kangaroo who grows no longer than your forearm. The pademelon (PAD-e-melon) is another, who sleeps in soft beds of grass. The cuscus (CUSS-cuss) lives in trees. Its eyes are huge, its fur thick and soft. It holds on to branches with pink hands and a pink grasping tail.

The cassowary is a shy forest dweller and eats mostly fruit.

But perhaps the most amazing of them all is the Matschies tree kangaroo. It lives only in one place in the world: the cloud forest of the Huon Peninsula, on the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea. (The western half of New Guinea is part of the much larger nation of Indonesia.)

New Guinea isnt exactly the sort of place youd expect a typical kid growing up in a New York City apartment to end up... but Lisa wasnt typical.

Lisa always loved animalswatching them, reading about them, writing stories about them. But being with animals wasnt easy. She was so allergic to fur, she even had to give away her beloved cat, Twinkles, when she was eleven. She couldnt have a dog, either.