When I was a boy of nine, I read a book called The Malay Archipelago,
by the great 19th century naturalist,
the co-proposer with Charles Darwin
of the theory of evolution by natural selection,
Alfred Russel Wallace. This is it.
And in it he describes his travels and explorations
through Borneo and Sumatra,
eastwards through the islands that are now Indonesia
to the western end of New Guinea.
And in it, I saw one illustration that thrilled me to the marrow.
It shows greater birds of paradise displaying in the forests of New Guinea
and being hunted by native plume hunters.
It seemed to me then as now, that to see the greater bird of paradise in display
must be one of the most thrilling sights in nature.
And it became my childhood ambition to go and do just that.
Well, it's taken me 60 years, but here I am.
(People chattering)
I first tried to see the birds back in 1957.
But then I could only get to eastern New Guinea,
where the species Wallace saw doesn't occur.
And there was another problem - the people used the plumes as money.
These are wedding gifts - pearl shells, mats sewn with cowrie shells
but, most valuable of all birds of paradise skins,
prepared in the traditional way by cutting off the legs and the wings,
to fully reveal the plumes. There were 21 of them.
The bride seemed pleased, but for us, looking for live birds,
there was worse to come -
a celebratory dance.
Each man wore plumes of at least 40 birds of paradise,
of several different kinds.
Most astonishing were the sawtooth quills they wore through the nose.
These came from the King of Saxony's bird, that then,
very few naturalists had even seen alive.
There seemed little chance of finding living birds here,
so we decided to go into wilder country to the north.
The headman called for porters.
We got 50. Once in the mountains,
our baggage was taken over by people who didn't wear feathers in their hair.
Instead, they had huge wigs, covered with bark cloth.
We heard calls of birds of paradise, we glimpsed them high in the trees,
but we couldn't find a place where we could film them.
And then, after three weeks one morning at dawn,
our luck changed.
Low down, in a casuarina tree
a plumed bird of paradise.
And there, his unplumed female.
With these pictures, we had achieved something.
As far as I knew this was the first film ever taken
of a bird of paradise displaying in the wild.
But our film was not in colour
the species was smaller than the one that Wallace had seen
and there were not a dozen dancing birds,
there was just one.
This was hardly the fulfilment of that boyhood ambition.
But now, 40 years on, I'm trying again.
Wallace arrived in the Far East in 1854
but it was three years before he caught the first glimpse
of a living bird of paradise.
And even then it must have been a very distant one.
For, as he wrote, the birds only display in the loftiest of trees.
And they are doing so in this one, right here.
I reckon they are at least a hundred feet above the ground.
Even with modern binoculars, it isn't easy to see exactly what they are doing.
As far as I know Wallace wasn't able to climb the tree
to get a closer view of the birds,
but these days we've got ways of doing so relatively simply.
You fire a thin line, with a catapult, over one of those high branches,
haul up a thicker rope, attach a system of counterweights,
then all you have to do, is to clip yourself on, and up you go.
Down goes the counterweight.
And now, I'm leaving that dark world of the forest floor
and really entering a completely new one.
Now I'm getting up into the canopy.
Into the world of the birds of paradise.
And here's the top.
The birds are in another emergent tree, just like this one,
and I've got an absolutely clear view of them.
It's unlikely that they're going to take fright
at my sudden appearance above the canopy,
because they've been using that tree for generation after generation,
and it will take a lot more than just me to put them off it.
This, at last is Wallace's picture come to life.
He was the first European to glimpse this extraordinary spectacle,
and he knew well in general terms, what was happening.
This is a female and she's come to pick a mate
from among the gorgeous males who are displaying.
A young male. He's dancing even though he hasn't yet got his plumes.
They don't develop until he's six or seven years old.
There are several young males here, putting in a little dancing practice.
This, however is almost certainly a female,
because the males are starting the second stage of their performance -
the bow, head down.
The female has hopped onto the perch of the male of her choice -
that's a straight invitation to mate.
Act Ill - the approach.
Head up.
Act IV - the first physical contact.
It looks rough, but presumably she likes this sort of treatment.
She could easily move away if she didn't.
And that's it.
And now there's another to be attended to.
Apparently, there's a queue on this particular perch.
This is all he does as a father.
Now she'll fly away and raise her young unaided.
The males on the other perches, in spite of all their efforts,
have no success at all.
He's at it again!
But his partner is not reacting properly.
She's facing away from him.
He's got it wrong, this is a young male.
All the matings are taking place on this perch, with this male.
But are the females choosing the perch or the dancer?
It's difficult to tell.
But it's easy to see why these wonderful plumes
should be so treasured by local people,
and why, when the first examples arrived in Europe in the 16th century,
they should have created a sensation, as they did.
Those first specimens had been prepared in the traditional way,
and had neither wings nor feet, and the books of the time showed them that way.
But how could such creatures fly or perch?
This book explained. The birds had no need to do either
because they floated in the sky, feeding on dew,
and only fell to earth when they died.
They were literally birds of paradise.
Even 200 years later, the illustrations involved a lot of guesswork.
For still no European had seen the living birds.
This kind, for example, had not only feathers,
but 12 long, naked quills sprouting from its flanks.
The artist did give it legs, but he was completely baffled by the plumes.
By the end of the 19th century, thanks to the discoveries of Wallace and others
the illustrations are much more accurate.
This is that 12-quilled bird again.
But could it really have its strange quills, or wires, as they're called,
bent back over its body like this?
It seems hardly likely.
Perhaps the artist had been working from a specimen
that had been badly packed.
And what about this?
This is the sicklebill bird of paradise.
Could it, in life, have great fans of plumes projecting above its wings,
like fancy epaulettes with a purple rim?
Even today, some of these species are little-known.
Many display in the thick forest at dawn, when there is not enough light to film.
That was what had caused us such problems 40 years ago.
But now we can resolve that difficulty with special video cameras.
And one of the species I most wanted to see
is that bird with the improbable epaulettes, the black sicklebill.
Its display in the wild has never been photographed or filmed,
it hasn't even been scientifically described.
But the local people say that a male does display on a perch just near here,
but it only does so at first light, just before dawn.
So the only thing to do, is to sit down and wait.
He's there! That dim, black shape on the sapling.
This really is seeing in the dark.
(Calling)
He's calling to attract females, but also to keep other males away.
This is his territory and he'll dance by himself.
Those things like arms are not his wings, they're those epaulettes.
So that's what he does with them!
It's even more unlikely than the drawing.
It's getting brighter.
Soon we should be able to see him just a little more clearly.
There's that purple line on the epaulette.
But there's still no sign of a female.
Ah, well, obviously time for breakfast.
A pandanus tree. Sicklebills are particularly fond of its fruit,
and there's lots of it around.
That's what he's after - and there's a female half-hidden in the leaves.
There's a second female.
A third!
All three are almost certainly his mates,
each building her own nest and feeding in his territory.
Many birds of paradise species have females coloured like this -
brown above and speckled or barred beneath.
And looking at them, it's easy to see that they're all related,
even though their males are so very different and various.
The New Guinea forest has an atmosphere all its own.
From one point of view, it's rather disappointing -
you don't see many mammals, far fewer than in Africa or South American forests.
But what this place lacks in mammals, it makes up for in birds.
Not that it's all that easy to see them.
You know they're around because you can hear them,
but if you want to watch them, you have to move fairly quietly.
And there is one of the smallest of the whole family.
This is the one with those extraordinary sawtooth plumes -
the King of Saxony's bird.
There's nothing else remotely like these plumes in the whole of the bird world.
He's calling for a female.
And it's not just his plumes that are unique - so is his way of dancing.
(Soft hissing)
That hissing noise is his call.
You can tell he's getting particularly excited
because he's erected the black feathers on his shoulders into a cape,
another of those transformation tricks
that seem to be a speciality of this family.
He's so worked up, he's trying to mate with a tuft of moss!
A female, at last.
Typical female colouring.
And that's never been filmed before.
New Guinea is a huge island.
A thousand miles long from east to west, lying between Australia and the equator.
It was rucked up from beneath the sea some 10,000,000 years ago,
as Australia drifted northwards
and pushed against the Asian section of the earth's crust.
The ancestors of the birds of paradise, probably starling-like creatures,
slowly spread from Asia, down chains of smaller islands
until they reached these vast forests.
And here, they evolved into a multitude of wildly different species,
that, between them, exploit every kind of feather adornment you can imagine.
But why did this great diversity of species come into existence?
Well, New Guinea as well as being an immense island,
is also an extremely varied one.
Up here, I'm at 11,000 feet, and the land is much poorer in food for birds
than the luxuriant tropical rainforests of lower altitudes.
And up here, there lives a bird of paradise
that may give us a clue about the ancestors of the whole family.
McGregor's bird of paradise.
And there's an obvious way in which it differs from most of its relations.
This is a pair - male and female look exactly the same.
The reason they do so is connected with food.
There's so little of it up here, that if nestlings are to get enough,
the male has to help the female to collect it.
So he can't have a lot of wives.
Just one.
And since he can't, therefore spend his time dancing in trees,
he hasn't developed an extravagant costume in which to show off.
His courtship is no more than this quick chase through the bushes.
At lower altitudes things are very different.
The tropical heat and the heavy rains produce a really rich environment.
As there are no monkeys to munch the fruit or squirrels to gather the seeds,
there's plenty of food for birds.
Here the females can raise their young unaided
and the males can concentrate on dancing.
And since there are no cats or jackals,
there's little danger in doing so on the ground.
The superb bird of paradise does just that.
And this log is his dancing stage.
As well as his spectacular cravat,
he's got a long sheaf of feathers at the back of his neck.
Extraordinary in itself, but you wait till he unfurls it!
Here's the female. Now there'll be some action.
This is the arena of another displaying bird.
I'm not on the mainland I've come to the island of Batanta
which is separated by quite a narrow strait.
But it has its own species of bird of paradise,
that evolved here and lives nowhere else.
And one way of trying to get a look at it,
is to put some leaves on this arena,
because this bird is meticulously tidy.
This isn't him. This is a pheasant pigeon.
Maybe a trespasser on his patch will so infuriate him that he will come down.
(Bird calling)
(Calling continues)
I can hear his calls.
There he is.
(Calling)
Wilson's bird of paradise.
He's got his own fashion gimmick - the bald look.
There goes the first of the leaves that I dropped.
He's really quite small - only the size of a starling.
Now he's starting cutting leaves.
Littering the place up himself.
Presumably he wants to get more light on the stage,
so that his colours show up.
That looks like a female.
She's got a slightly less brilliant blue head.
But that's a young male.
He's not yet got coloured feathers on his body, but his bald head is very blue,
and he's behaving like a male too.
ls he helping the boss by doing a bit of the housework?
Probably not.
It's more likely he's come here to practise the skills he's going to need
when he's old enough to have an arena of his own.
She looks interested.
So does he.
(Calling)
He's clearly not much of a dancer.
But with a costume like that who would need to be?
What an amazing bird!
I've seen lots of coloured illustrations of them
I've seen mounted specimens in museums
but nothing has prepared me for the splendour of this wonderful thing.
It's as though it's illuminated from inside, the colours are incandescent.
When Wallace collected a particularly spectacular specimen,
he wrote in his book, "My heart began to beat violently, blood rushed to my head,
"and I felt more in danger of fainting
"than when I had been in apprehension of immediate death.
"I had a headache for the rest of the day."
Well, I haven't got a headache, but I think I know how he felt.
Half a dozen of the 40-odd species dance on the ground like that.
To find another, we left the island of Batanta and went back to the mainland
to the Arfak mountains in western New Guinea.
The home of the Arfak parrotia.
This is his display ground.
Here too the forest floor has been cleared
and the saplings stripped of their leaves.
He's dressed entirely in black, except for that white disc on his forehead.
Though there is a iridescent patch on his chest
that he can reveal when he wants to.
And he does have those six black pennants on his head.
But he dazzles his mates not so much with his costum' e
as with his choreography.
And that being so, he is particularly keen on clearing his stage
of anything that might trip up a dancer.
Now he's miming, going through the motions of clearing away leaves,
even though there aren't any.
The stage is now absolutely immaculate.
And here's another of those juveniles
who come to the arenas of their elders and betters to practise.
Amazing! But how sad that none of the girls are here to watch.
The master is back.
An audience is assembling.
He is going to show how it should be done.
First, the warm-up - ritualised runs across the stage.
A little more mimed leaf-clearing.
Mounting excitement in the dress circle.
And now, the performance begins.
The absence of ground predators,
that has allowed some birds of paradise to display on the ground,
has been exploited by another family of birds,
that used to be thought to be close cousins of the birds of paradise,
but are now thought to be somewhat distantly related.
and this is one of their constructions.
This is not a nest, it's a jewel box.
And these are not eggs, they are blue berries.
The treasures of a male bowerbird.
And here is one of those treasure-hoarding capitalists,
the flamed bowerbird.
He may not have elaborate plumes,
but his body feathers could scarcely be more brilliant.
Those on his shoulders have a gloss like spun glass.
But this is about all he does to display them.
It's as if his ancestors once had big plumes,
and although he hasn't inherited them,
he still goes through the motions of displaying them.
Whether that is so or not he now puts his faith in his jewels.
And here's another to add to that collection.
Now he's chewing up leaves into a paste.
Perhaps he's trying to beautify the bower walls.
The abundance of food in the forest
has had the same effect on the bowerbird family
as it has on their cousins the birds of paradise.
It's enabled the males to become polygamists.
But whereas birds of paradise attract their wives with plumes on their bodies,
these birds do it with jewels and their bowers.
And like plumes, the bowers have been elaborated to an extraordinary degree.
Like this one, for example. This is a maypole bower.
The builder - a drab little bird.
But then, he relies even less on his feathers
and much more on his skill as an architect and builder.
And he's got something to be really proud of.
He decorates this impressive construction
with green lichen around the base.
And from the end of the twigs of the tower, he hangs frass -
caterpillar droppings.
He does have the vestiges of a yellow crest.
And he's a quite extraordinary songster.
And several of these males will build their towers
quite close to one another in the forest.
The females tour them make up their minds,
presumably about which is the finest,
and then mate with the architect beside his creation.
They then go away and rear their young entirely by themselves.
The father of this nestling may never even see it.
He spends nine months of the year close to his award-winning building,
hoping, no doubt, that yet another passing female will give him her vote.
And this is the work of the master builder among bowerbirds.
I'm in the Vogelkop on the far western tip of New Guinea
and this is the bower of the Vogelkop bowerbird.
And what an astonishment it is! Surely one of the wonders of the natural world.
The bower has been completely roofed over,
thatched with these stems of orchids.
It's been built around the base of a sapling,
it has a stark pillar right in the middle,
and it's got two smaller pillars on the side, to support it.
The whole of the treasury is five or six yards across.
And what treasures it contains! Or what a variety of treasures it contains!
On the far side, there are the black stems of tree ferns.
Here is the lawn neatly planted with moss, and on it,
the shiny wing covers of beetles.
There are orange fruit, there are these glowing orange dead leaves,
These are the acorns of the tropical oaks which are common around here.
Behind me, there are black fruits.
All of which has been brought specially by the bird.
Bowerbirds are so dedicated to their work
that even if you sit out in the open beside the bower
they will often continue to work, provided you sit absolutely still.
This Vogelkop bowerbird is the plainest of his family,
with no sign whatever of a crest.
But the more spectacular the display in your bower,
presumably the less need you have to impress your mate with bright feathers.
And it's difficult to imagine
a more impressive collection of treasures than this.
But they do have to be properly arranged
to show them off really well.
Flowers, whenever they appear in the forest
have an obvious appeal to a bird who has a passion for interior decoration.
From one point of view, these adornments are better than feathers.
Individual birds of paradise cannot choose their plumes' shape and colour.
They have to display with what their genes have given them.
Bowerbirds, however, can choose.
If a male decides that he stands a better chance of seducing a female with pink,
rather than blue then he can decorate his bower that way.
So it's the tastes and fancies of the females, single mothers,
who have no need of the help of the male in bringing up their families,
that has led to these extravagant exhibitions.
Whether or not the bowerbirds are closely related to the birds of paradise,
both families have reacted in remarkably similar ways to the asset they share -
the huge richness of this forest.
This really is a paradise for birds.
And the variety of bowers it has allowed one family to build
is more than matched by the variety of plumes evolved by the other.
One group of female birds of paradise, for example,
fancied glossy throats, and this is the result.
The splendid astrapia.
Tails clearly didn't impress them to anything like the same degree.
But the splendid astrapia has a close cousin, Shaw Mayer's astrapia,
and those females had different tastes.
They were hot for tails.
There's no wonder that the result of their selections over many generations
is also called the ribbon-tailed bird of paradise.
The female has to sit on a nest and a long tail would get in the way,
but because of her and her forebears' decisions
about what makes a male attractive
he now has the longest tail in proportion to his body of any bird in the world.
The smallest member of the family - the king bird of paradise.
He has yet another kind of tail - two wire-like quills,
each tipped with a little green disc like a coin.
Not so obviously impressive as the ribbon-tail
but wait till you see what he does with them.
Wingspreads and an extraordinary, scarcely birdlike, call
are just the beginning of things.
Just attention-grabbing ways
to let any female around know that he's on his perch,
and about to display his prowess as an acrobat and a juggler.
What could be more attention-grabbing than that?
But that's not all. When he's really excited, he's got a final stunt -
the pendulum.
There it is.
Down in the lowlands
in the swamps beside the rivers, lives the 12-wired bird of paradise.
He comes to his display post in the early dawn.
This is the bird I used to think had been drawn so inaccurately,
but the old illustration was right -
the wires, the quills, are indeed bent back in a tangle.
The female doesn't have them.
But do bent-back quills appeal to a female?
They're hardly beautiful.
Courtship seems to be some kind of game,
a variation of I'm The King Of The Castle, perhaps.
Only, with a very special prize.
He deliberately brushed her face with his rear quills!
He's doing it again!
It seems that she prefers to be seduced, not by visual thrills, but by tactile ones.
And after the quill flick, the beak poke.
It may be an odd technique, but it works.
I've now left New Guinea,. I'm 200 miles to the west
on the island of Halmahera one of the Malukus, the Spice Islands.
It was here that Wallace made perhaps his most spectacular discovery of all -
a completely unknown bird of paradise.
On that today carries his name - Wallace's standardwing.
It was only observed once more
in the hundred years that followed his discovery.
And until recently, some people feared it might have disappeared altogether.
So it is one of the least-known of all species.
But we do know that the males
like the greater bird, which Wallace made so famous
display in groups, and at dawn.
They've gathered in one of these trees,
and from the racket I'd guess there are 30 or 40 of them.
(Many birds calling)
The standards - those long isolated feathers -
project not from the tail, the flank or the head
but, would you believe, the front-edge of the wings.
These are advertising flights -
whizzing vertically into the air to show passing females what's going on.
There he goes again.
I've been watching this perch since very first light,
and I must have seen at least a dozen displays,
but not one of them has ended with a mating.
I think that's because this is one of the junior perches,
the subsidiary ones. The senior perch, where all the action is,
is over there in a much taller tree.
That's where males are winning mates.
A female.
This male is certainly putting on a great performance.
ls she, in fact, assessing and comparing the displays?
A copulation. As ever, a matter of seconds.
Another! Same place.
There seems little, to my eye at least,
to choose between all the several dozen males.
And I don't see how a female could make a proper choice.
Maybe it is the perch in these great assemblies of competing males
that is the important thing.
As it also may be among the greater bird of paradise.
If that is so, then in these mass displays,
the males are not so much showing off to the females
as posturing aggressively to one another.
Using their plumes to demonstrate their strength and vigour,
as stags do with their antlers.
That would enable them to establish a ranking between them all,
and the boy at the top of the rank gets the number one perch.
One of the mysteries about birds of paradise, as far as I'm concerned,
is why, when they have such wonderful colours
do they do so much of their displays in the semi-darkness before dawn?
It's only now that the sun is up
that I can really see the full beauty of these wonderful plumes.
The displays are over.
It's time to get smartened up again after all that rough and tumble.
The white standards are looking a bit bedraggled too,
and at last I can see exactly how they're attached to the front of the wing.
ls there a more elegant cravat, in both shape and colour, worn by any bird?
I doubt it.
So, after weeks of work and travel
with cameramen Richard Kirby and Mike Potts,
we had filmed the displays of not just one species,
but representatives of all the major groups of birds of paradise.
And I had achieved the ambition of a lifetime.
Wallace's emotions on discovering such marvels
must surely be echoed by all of us who follow him.
This is what he wrote -
"I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations
"of these things of beauties have run their course
"year by year being born and living and dying amid these dark, gloomy woods,
"with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness,
"to all appearances, such a wanton waste of beauty.
"lt seems sad that, on the one hand
"such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms
"only in these wild, inhospitable regions.
"This consideration must surely tell us
"that all living things were not made for man.
"Many of them have no relation to him
"Their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates
"their struggles for existence,
"their vigorous life and early death would seem to be immediately related
"to their own wellbeing and perpetuation alone."
Indeed so.