BBC Natural World Birds of Paradise

Imagine creatures so beautiful...

that people thought they had come down directly from Heaven.

So striking...

that the first Europeans to see them

thought they could only have escaped from the Garden of Eden.

In fact, that Eden was New Guinea...

..one of the last inhabited islands to be explored by Europeans.

And it remains virtually the only place

where you can see these wonderful creatures.

They were birds,

but unlike birds that anyone had ever seen before.

They brought the image of beauty almost to the edge of absurdity.

And their displays

were even more extraordinary and bizarre than their appearance

some of the most complex to be found in the animal kingdom.

They may not have come from the Garden of Eden,

but they certainly deserved the name

that the first European scientists gave them -

the birds of paradise.

Yet much of what they do is still unknown.

More than 150 years after

the first scientific observations of these creatures,

in spite of innumerable expeditions

and countless hours of scientific observation,

we are still only catching glimpses - tantalising glimpses -

of these heavenly creatures.

A new generation of scientists, and film crews,

are attempting to put that right.

But these remarkable birds don't give up their secrets easily.

Another expedition is setting off to look for birds of paradise.

But this one is different.

This one is being mounted by the New Guinea people themselves.

A new generation of local conservationists

are concerned that paradise bird numbers may be falling.

This team is led by Miriam Supuma.

With her is bird expert Paul Igag.

Ah! I've got my knickers wet!

Miriam's love of nature began in a small village school in the mountains.

To follow that passion,

she learned English,

got herself to university, and finished her ecology fieldwork in Australia.

Over the next three months,

she aims to see and document ten birds of paradise species.

She has agreed to let our camera crew go with her.

They're starting with the smallest of the family -

the king bird.

Miriam searches for signs.

You have to know what to look for... and she does.

You can see peck marks on this fruit here.

That's his call,

but she just can't see him.

It tends to like this area.

One of the reasons is because of the light coming through.

They're show-off birds, so they like to show their plumage

and the light complements their bright plumage.

The signs are good.

They decide to build a hide.

It must be big enough to seat her and the camera crew.

But there's a problem.

A dead banana tree blocks the camera's view.

Miriam has it... gently pruned back!

She's confident the birds will return.

This is the mating season, when they become less shy.

She discovered this when she was still a student.

Working in the forest early one morning,

she spotted a bird of paradise high in the tree tops...

..and below it, another preening its plumes in the morning sun.

And then they displayed.

The sight changed her life.

On that day, I noticed about six or seven birds of paradise,

singing and dancing, and it just continued for five or ten minutes.

I stopped what I was doing - I was measuring trees at the time.

I was looking at it - just staring at it in awe.

Naturalists fall in love with nature and then come back for more.

Seven years on, and experience has taught Miriam

that the best way to observe the male king bird

is to find his display perch and then wait for him to arrive.

Teaches you a lot of patience, doesn't it?

And patience can often pay off.

Oh, there it is. Wow!

The king bird.

It's facing that way with its back towards us.

You can see the red back.

It's gone up into the canopy.

He's a deep chilli-pepper red with a snow-white breast.

Two long quills sprout from his tail,

each tipped by a green disc like a coin.

That was a...that was a rare moment.

Oh, there - there it is again. Wow!

She's thrilled.

With other males calling in the forest nearby,

Miriam is sure that she's found a good population here.

The male king bird will call to the females in the area.

If none come, he will perform without them.

After puffing himself up,

he flicks his quills above his head and waggles them,

making the little discs dance in the air above him.

He's still hoping for an audience.

Undeterred, he ends with a flourish.

He swings upside down and locks his legs...

..and then he turns himself into a pendulum.

The king bird is a soloist.

The males of many other species display in groups.

These are the greater birds of paradise.

Males assemble every day in one special tree, waiting for a female to arrive.

When one does, they all snap into action.

And she selects the one she prefers.

She's rewarded with a one-on-one, starting with pecks on the head.

And eventually she accepts him.

While all the males may appear equally gorgeous to our eyes,

females apparently detect differences.

What's more, they nearly all mate with the same male.

By selecting the finest plumes in this way,

the females have increased the males' beauty, generation after generation,

and so brought these magnificent dances into existence.

The spectacular beauty of their birds fascinates the people of New Guinea,

as I discovered back in 1957.

I knew that the bird of paradise plumes were important,

and I quickly discovered just how important.

The plumes are the equivalent of money

and an essential payment in the bargaining that goes on between families

when fixing a wedding settlement...

..and when men want to dance.

And what I saw 50 years ago is still going on today.

Goroka Town, in the heart of the mountains.

It's festival time and feathers are still essential headwear.

Go, go with the photograph if you can, or...

It's a key moment in the year for Miriam's research.

Look at these and then look at what's on the headdresses.

The feathers of many different species of bird are used in the headdresses,

and the team want to find out how many come from birds of paradise.

These scenes are not very different from those I filmed myself

half a century earlier.

There were 500 of these men,

stamping up and down monotonously and unceasingly.

And as I watched them, I realised

that here was the reason why no-one had brought us birds of paradise.

Miriam wants to see my footage from 1957

so she can compare the numbers and species used by dancers then and now.

Each man was wearing the feathers of 30 or 40 birds.

At this one dance, we were seeing

the plumes of over 20,000 slaughtered birds of paradise.

The desire to possess the beauty of the birds

is an ancient obsession still alive in these tribal lands.

The island of New Guinea is huge.

1,000 miles long,

lying between Australia and the equator,

it was pushed up from the bottom of the sea way back in geological time.

A few land mammals from Australia managed to get here,

including some marsupials such as the strange tree kangaroo.

But there are no indigenous carnivorous mammals here.

With fruit growing all the year round, this is indeed a paradise for birds.

Then, some 30,000 years ago,

the greatest threat to their existence walked in on two legs.

But today, there are people here whose only aim is to protect the birds.

Paul Igag was brought up on the coast, a fisherman's son.

Paul gave up the fishing life to study biology.

He married a highland girl

and stayed up here to pursue his love of forest birds.

The call of the raggiana bird of paradise.

You can see a male up there with full adult plumage.

He's trying to attract females.

Paul has seen many of the forest's rarest bird species.

He builds platforms in the canopy where he can sit quietly and wait.

Some birds are quite bold and seem undisturbed by his presence.

Others are much more wary, like the magnificent rifle bird of paradise.

Paul has been watching the birds intensively for over 15 years.

His tracking skills are crucial to the project.

Together, Paul and Miriam start to identify

the bird populations that may need protection.

Paul is taking Miriam to a remote village southeast of Goroka.

As I did on my own journey to the interior,

they have to cross high mountain ranges blanketed by forest.

Between these walls of rock lie immense valleys like the Wahgi.

Hundreds of tribes have lived on the island for thousands of years,

separated by these barriers of water and rock.

800 languages have evolved,

some as different from one another as English is to Chinese.

The language of Haia village is spoken only here.

Even today, the only contact between these people and the outside world

is the plane that takes away their coffee beans.

It's a warm welcome back for Paul.

He's been coming here for the last few years to help map tribal boundaries.

This forest belongs to the Haia people.

They have always been hunters,

but now they are helping to record the rich wildlife.

One day, all this may become a protected reserve.

For now, it's hundreds of square miles of untouched mountain forest.

For the villagers, a wildlife reserve could bring work and education.

There's a lot at stake.

The locals' hunting knowledge is invaluable for the project.