Butterflies Aren't Free

The view from the air shows it all -- a coral-lipped shore, an aquamarine harbour peppered with dug-out canoes and the frontier Indonesian town of Manokwari. This is a wild place, with big bites taken out of it. We double past the Christian mission. Then banking above a vast monotony of oil palm plantations, trees spaced in tidy rows like hair transplants, we leave the altered landscape of the lowlands, and rising over ridges of jungle and head for an enclave of some of the most strange and wonderful nature left on earth -- the Arfak mountains, homeland of the Hatam.

Irian Jaya is the largest, richest, least developed Indonesian province, making it a target of the government for accelerated logging, gold mining, oil palm monoculture and transmigrant settlement. Nearly all of Irian Jaya has been blueprinted for intensive development. But, because of its incredible diversity of unique plants and animals, it is also a focus of the world's conservation community -- to try to save it.

But for all the efforts going on around the world, there are still no surefire paths to saving nature. This was the reason that Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) was created. This experimental seven year program funded by the United States Agency for International Development wanted to learn from real experience -- through the disasters as well as the successes under what conditions conservation fails or succeeds. This is a highly unusual situation in the conservation world where money typically depends on painting a rosy picture. BCN tested the idea that if communities can get enough sustainable economic benefits from an enterprise linked to conserving their environment then they will actively conserve. Linkage is the key.

We chose Arfak as one of 20 of the most significant and most threatened natural environments in the Asia - Pacific and set about trying to find a solution -- a win-win for the local people, as well as for the endangered animals and their habitats.

Before the Hatam began ranching birdwing butterflies, they poached and sold them through the black market, with no regard for the species' survival. Poaching was one of the Hatam's few means of making money. But this was a no win deal for both the people and the butterflies. The Hatam were paid a few cents per butterfly while the butterflies were headed for extinction. Only the middlemen, opportunistic traders in Manokwari were making money -- at both the locals' and the insects' expense.

 

The Experiment

In 1989, the Hatam and World Wide Fund for Nature launched an experiment -- could carefully managed exploitation of endangered species save them from extinction? The theory went like this -- by creating a reserve of primary rainforest in the center of the Hatam's 22 villages and helping them to legally ranch birdwing butterflies, the Hatam would make more money than by poaching. The poachers would become ranchers, the butterflies' numbers would increase because the ranchers would leave 10% of the females to fly back into the reserve. And since the butterflies need untouched primary rainforest, and the Hatam would see the sense of preserving it to protect their livelihoods, all the other animals that live in the forest would benefit too. At least -- that was the theory. In 1993, BCN entered the picture to support the establishment of the business, to monitor the results, and to evaluate where theory ended and reality began.

In September 1998,our small BCN team traveled to the butterfly farms in Arfak and interviewed a wide spectrum of people to see how the Hatam communities -- and the butterflies themselves were faring. Was the experiment working? Were the local communities receiving sufficient benefits from the butterfly business to conserve the Arfak reserve? Is community-based conservation really happening? Do the existing policies support the butterfly business and their conservation? And what is the likelihood that the enterprise, and long-term conservation will succeed?

Even in the United States (which has well developed infrastructure, a population that is well experienced with a cash economy, and established markets) only about one out of every seven businesses survives beyond five years. In Arfak by contrast, there was no infrastructure, the people were entering a cash economy for the first time, there were no established markets for the butterflies, the country was in an economic crisis and the government was shaky. Trying not only to be financially self-sustainable, but ecologically and socially sustainable too was a tall order indeed.

 

Ranching Butterflies

Today, six species of endangered birdwing butterfly are ranched in the buffer zone on the Arfak reserve's perimeter. These are unusual farms. The Hatam -- who knew the birdwings' ways -- planted their favourite food plants in gardens on its perimeter. The combination of flowering and leafy plants provide a complete habitat where butterflies find everything they need to grow and reproduce. The "live stock" flutter in from the reserve, attracted to the gardens. Technically the farming of butterflies is ranching because the breeding stock are free.

Once the gardens are established, butterfly ranching is low maintenance. The butterflies are the perfect product - light, low bulk, non-perishable (they are sold as deadstock), unique to the Arfaks, simple technology, and high value. They make an ideal cargo for the Hatam who must hike 12 hours down a tangled root path to the town of Manokwari where they sell the pupae to YBLBC, the butterfly cooperative set up to run the butterfly business, a local NGO offshoot of WWF. The cooperative buys and sells the butterflies, arranges for special CITES permits -- because these are endangered species -- markets and ships the butterflies and of course pays the farmers for their exquisite crop. Iridescent beauties the size of swallows, Ornithoptera, as the birdwings are known, are highly prized as objets d'art . A single specimen can command hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

To avoid inbreeding, the butterfly ranching relies on the presence of the forest and wild butterflies for breeding stock and fresh genetic material. The farmers fully appreciate that encroachment on the reserve, such as slash and burn for farming, or logging, means diminished returns. The Hatam refer to a forest as hutan limba, forest wasted, or hutan utuh, forest intact. Four of the birdwing species can only exist in Hutan utuh - which also happen to produce the butterflies worth the most money.

Our fact finding expedition into the mountains included Pak Saragih, John Parks and Avi Mahaningtyas. Saragih is the head of the butterfly cooperative, Yayasan Bina Lestari Bumi Cedrawasih, (YBLBC). While the Protestant missionaries, ensconced here for over 30 years, may be the Hatam's spiritual shepherds, Saragih, a Sumatran Muslim, (YES ITS TRUE) has taken on the role as their father of development. Parks is from BCN's Washington D.C. office. A big blonde surfer who is part Hawaiian, Parks is savvy about community-based businesses and ecology. It is his personal mission to devise ways to teach indigenous people how to use simple means to monitor and manage their resources so they can determine their own futures. Avi Mahaningtyas, an Indonesian member of the BCN team is an expert in working with Indonesian and a knowledgeable translator.

 

The Meetings

As soon as we arrived, the farmers gathered with great excitement to greet Saragih and led us through their villages. Carved from the jungle, bordering a clear stream, the village of Minyambou consists of two rows of houses on either side of a single footpath. Tidy wooden cabins and a few traditional "houses of a thousand legs" perch on poles of bamboo. But the overall impression was garden. The Hatam have planted riotous arrangements of flowers - red gingers, orange heliconias, pink cosmos, and two storey high hibiscus, frilly beacons for the high flying butterflies that live in the wilderness of the Arfak reserve but come here to dine.

A large moving shadow startled me. High above the flowers, in the filtered light of the rainforest something large is flashing neon-like -- green, red, yellow, and black. My astonished eyes gradually comprehend that this living light show is a not a bird, but a butterfly. Flapping heavily, powerfully from hibiscus to hibiscus, the butterfly hovers, its body-lengthed tongue coiling and uncoiling, probing blossoms for nectar. Its size and strength bend anyone's definition of "butterfly." A farmer seeing my amazement said something in Hatam. "What did he say ?" I asked .

"The flowers make us happy, the butterflies make us rich."

Swept along by the exuberant Hatam, we entered a small cabin joined by about 30 butterfly farmers, all men. One held a sleeping baby. The men squatted, feet flat on the floor, knees towards heaven. Several women sat down the hall, observing us with somber interest. Women make up half the number of actual "farmers," but according to the patriarchal rules of this clan-based society, only the men attend meetings .

Our meeting began with a lengthy prayer expressing the Hatam's longing to Jesus for the day when they will become "civilized." Saragih's address honored the people. He tells them that they are not , "a poor and rotten people" as western Indonesians call them. Then he introduced us as representatives of the organization who have helped support the establishment of the butterfly cooperative and who want to know "what is working for you with the butterfly farming and what is not working for you." This launched a very long and intense debate. A clan based society, the Hatam are truly a "discussing people."

Shur Woresor was about 50. Like many of the older Hatam he was missing teeth and he could pass for 65. He told them, "The ranching has enabled me to put an aluminum roof on my house, and I can also buy oil, sugar and salt." He expanded the gardens so his wife and children could tend their own plants and harvest the pupae. They may spend their money, he says, on what they want , "luxury items like health or education." According to Hatam custom, whoever plants the food plants should get the money from the butterflies that come and lay eggs on them.

But in the last year, the farmers said things have changed. In September 1998, one goliath butterfly pupae bought them one kilogram of sugar. A year ago it would have bought them three kilograms. The farmers asked Saragih to increase the price of the butterflies to reflect the devalued rupiah. Saragih responded that the price is based on market demand and explained the problems that the business faces. "The cooperative is a small dinghy with a lot of people in the boat. When you are in rough seas, the strategy is not to speed up, you go slow and steady so you don't get swamped."

 

The Goldfish Ponds

The butterfly business is acting as a catalyst for conservation and business in unanticipated ways. During a break from the meetings, the farmers took us behind the village where they had diverted a stream and dug a series of fish ponds. With pride they told us,"Before we had no farming understanding ,we only knew how to directly harvest forest goods, now we have confidence." One farmer recounted how he ferried the fish up the mountains in a big plastic bag. . "I had to change the water nine times on the way up. But I didn't lose a single fish."

One farmer named Ingriss Wongorr said, "Now we don't have to hunt birds for food. When our children say, they want meat, we can give them fish. "If we could have a lot of fish, we won't have to eat birds. Then there will be lots of birds and people will come to see them. So my brother, Daud for example can be a guide."

 

History of the Arfak Reserve

From the community discussions with the farmers, it quickly became evident that there was a major problem brewing -- the status of the Arfak reserve. The Hatam felt they'd been duped and it wasn't the first time. The whole history of the Hatam has been a series of others laying claim to their homelands.

First colonized by the Dutch, in 1963 the eastern half of the island of New Guinea was colonized again, this time by the new republic of Indonesia, hungry for land and resources. While Irian Jaya represents almost 21% of Indonesia's total territory, it has less than 1% (1.5 million) of its population. In the 1980's, the Indonesian Government began transplanting "straight hairs" as the fuzzy haired Irians refer to the Javanese, to help solve both Java's population problem and to have a colonizing effect on the ever simmering Free Papua Movement. Setting up Javanese style villages at the base of the Arfak mountains the Indonesian Government tried to lure the Hatam down with promises of "a healthy home" with a corrugated tin roof (a highly prized item in Arfak where organic roofs have a six month life span), two hectares of land for growing rice and vegetables and financial support for a year while their crops grew. But the Hatam had no history of tending anything and were hopeless rice farmers. Their new neighbours called them "the stupid, rotten people" and mocked their forest ways. Shamed and frustrated, the Hatam tore off their corrugated roofs and filed back up into the mountains.

In 1987, on the heels of this fiasco, the Indonesian branch of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) saw an opportunity. A young WWF staffer named Ian Craven approached the Hatam with a plan to map their lands, establish a reserve and ranch birdwing butterflies on the perimeter of the reserve. The Hatam were eager to move into a cash economy. Butterfly farming was the payoff for the Hatam agreeing to the reserve.

The butterfly ranching fit with the Hatam's culture. With no tradition of animal husbandry, they could work on altering the forest structure slightly, sit back and wait for the butterflies to carry out their own life cycle, then harvest the results. The Hatam supported the butterfly project because only they could do it. The transmigrants from Java, Flores and Lombok couldn't compete, because they didn't know anything about the butterflies' habits, about the food plants, or the forest. Butterfly ranching was all about pride.

Craven worked with the villages to define the reserve. The Hatam liked what he was doing because it formalized boundaries between the villages and cleared up disputes. They put the 70 square kilometer reserve in the centre of a necklace of villages.(Bernd is 70 km right?) The villagers set the rules about how they would access the forest and established which areas they would work for the butterflies. When the Hatam villages finally signed a letter agreeing to the nature reserve and the boundaries and the traditional concept of "Igya ser Hanjop," which means "Let's guard and use our land and resources," it was their understanding that they could still fully access the reserve's resources -- but that outsiders could not. Soon after, the reserve was established.

Although no one is entirely clear about what happened -- Craven was killed doing a biological survey from the air, when his missionary plane crashed -- somewhere along the line, something shifted. When Hatam farmers found government forestry workers nailing signs on the reserve boundaries that said, "State forest," they went ballistic. The Forestry workers were verbally aggressive. The Hatam tore down the signs and violence seemed imminent.

The Hatam are renowned for their short fuses and recounting the story to us in the Minyambou meeting they grew heated. One farmer said, "If the Government insists on making it a state forest which means people cannot go into the forest and cut rattan and wood for their homes, we are ready to war."

Another intense looking man named Daud Wongorr followed the discussion with angry black eyes. Finally he spoke with great passion, "If worse comes to worst it may be necessary to destroy the reserve rather than let the Indonesian government have it."

Duncan Neville, a former WWF person who worked with the Hatam to establish their farms explained, " If the Hatam see something not being a success, they would rather destroy it than see it and be reminded. It is their mindset."

 

Butterfly Biology

As the Hatam know, butterflies can't exist without the plants on which they depend. Adults feed on nectar while caterpillars eat leaves. The larvae are so specific about their food preferences that they can't eat anything else. Tasting plants with their feet and antennae, adult butterflies determine whether they have found the right food plant, and there they lay their eggs. For birdwing butterflies, only the climbing vine called Aristolochia will do. The caterpillars must have enough leaves to feed them through their six weeks of development to a pupa. Within the natural diversity of the rainforest, Aristolochia, are few and far between. And different species of birdwings specialize on different species of Aristolochia..

It's hard to imagine ruthlessness in a caterpillar. But the birdwing butterflies are limited by the availability of Aristolochia and as a result, a goliath larva will strip a vine clean of foliage, then wriggle to the base of the plant where it makes a deep, lateral cut through the trunk of the vine, killing off the vine. O. priamus or goliath larvae sharing the same host foodplant are starved to death. Thus the goliath larva has secured a future free of competitors.

The natural survival of the butterflies in the wild is astonishingly low. Ornithoptera usually lay about 200 eggs in a life time. Only two eggs make it to adulthood. In the Hatams' gardens the butterflies' survival climbs from 1% to 60% because the farmers keep predators such as birds at bay. The eggs hatch and become leaf nibbling caterpillars. The caterpillars are succulent, covered with soft spikes. A juicy morsel by any bird's standards -- this is a vulnerable time. John spent time caterpillar watching. If he stuck his nose too close, the caterpillar tried to protect itself by extruding ominous looking orange horns. If he placed it on the top of a leaf, it immediately crawled underneath, so as not to be seen by predators.

The farmers showed us how they carefully wrap the hard-shelled pupae in mosses for transport. The next day they carried their valuable cargo a long day's hike to the butterfly cooperative in Manokwari. There the carry coddled pupae metamorphosed to adulthood in a temperature-controlled room duplicating the butterflies' natural mountain environment. As soon as the butterflies emerge, they are injected with ethyl alcohol, killing them instantly, before they can do any damage to their wings in order to command the highest prices.

 

Unexpected Outcomes

The butterfly enterprise had unexpected results. It alleviated the tension amongst the villagers. "The clans were scared of each other, " said Duncan. "Working with the butterflies helped because it was like a common enterprise ... We took guides into villages where they had never been before in their life. There was a lot of competition about it, but because it was a joint enterprise, they were all working on it together they were trying to learn from each other."

"Instead of saying you should do this and that, we used to spend a lot of time walking around the mountains," recalled Duncan. "We'd walk around the villages and see what they were doing that was succeeding. We'd go to one village and notice that they had put the plants under one type of bush and given it a mulch of leaves. And then we'd go around to the next village and say, "Hey did you see what they're doing over there? So we were making sure the knowledge was being shared about. It worked way better like that because there was inter village competition as well. He continued, "Thirty years ago if people were walking between two villages if they were alone then they could easily be killed - you couldn't go outside your village area. People would ask the question, what is that person doing on my land? They can only be there to poach, to spy out a raiding party or to steal. I don't know them, they are no relation to me, So shoot them."

"When the farming groups were set up in the mountains we wrote them letters to invite them to workshop," Duncan reminisced, "instead of just sending word by someone or a general notice. They started replying with letters using the same format. It formalized the relationship and gave them some status."

 

Moving into Marketing

The first phase was technical, working with the villages to figure out the best ways to grow the food plants. "Then we moved into the second phase which was setting up the marketing operation," recalls Duncan."That was really the most difficult thing. We produced a lot of butterflies and then we needed to sell them."

First of all he tried to work with the illegal poachers. "Initially we wanted to work with the Chinese traders who had been buying poached butterflies illegally for a long time and who had existing markets. We would have taken their business and legalized it. But you got to remember the profits from doing it illegally are huge. They pay 3,000 or 4,000 rupiah (30 or 40 cents) and they sell it for $80. They're talking huge profits because they were paying such low rates and marking them up so high - So they could afford to have stock vanish in the post, or lose stock - they were making a lot of money. We offered to set up a business with them because it would have been easier. But it didn't happen, they didn't want to do it."

When the thieves didn't work out as a marketing partnership, Duncan approached the missionaries to help establish an institutional umbrella under which they could put the butterfly business. They weren't interested in going into business either.

Finally, in desperation, WWF set up their own NGO to run the business -- YBLBC. "We were quite pressurized for time, " explained Neville, " because the villagers were producing more butterflies than we could sell. If we had delayed any longer they would have gone into the forest and cut all the vines down."

When the business began, YBLBC and the farmers weren't sure what prices the butterflies could command. Now, they've determined that different species range from $5.00 for a pair of Ornithoptera priamus poseidon to $390.00 a pair for Ornithoptera paradisea chrysanthmum. Hybrid birdwings are especially prized for their uniqueness. Yoso, YBLBC's marketing director explained with great animation, how he figured out what he could get for a hybrid by auctioning it off using the connections of a dealer in California. Pitting a French buyer against an American in an auction, the hybrid sold for $7600. The Californian took 40% for her role, but it was still a coup. Yoso beamed shyly at his own ingenuity.

Although the Hatam no longer poach the butterflies, some other tribes still do and the government does little to support the Hatam's efforts to legally and sustainably ranch birdwing butterflies. The illegal trading prices undercut what the cooperative can offer since YBLBC pays the farmers fair prices. Usually if they get caught, the Government only confiscates the butterflies. And there are no consequences for poaching." Poachers tell buyers that a bribe of US$2 is generally enough to grease the wheels if they are perchance caught. Then there are permitting nightmares. The Government stalls three to six months in granting CITES export permits for the legally farmed butterflies, while they accept bribes expediting the illegal smugglers' prompt service.

 

Keeping Watch on the Resources

Back in Manokwari, at the YBLBC office John put on a monitoring workshop for the farmers. Monitoring or more simply put, "keeping watch" allows the Hatam to manage their resources, to keep track of the impacts of the butterfly ranching on the butterfly populations and supports the butterfly business. This workshop was a follow-up to training he did a year ago.

Not only have the Hatam applied what they learned last year, but they have organized themselves into monitoring teams and have been collecting the data on their own. At this workshop they were keen to learn more.

Over 40 farmers hiked down from the mountains for the three day event, many with their families. The families lounged in the treed area behind the YBLBC office where there are dormitories for the Hatam and cooking facilities. The workshop was inside the cooperative. Despite the sweat-streaming heat the Hatam were unwavering in their attention. They saw monitoring as their tool for controlling butterfly production and controlling threats. Parks has a gift for making science simple and so they hung on John's and Avi's every word. He started with basic ideas, like cause and effect so that the Hatam had the foundation to understand analysis and responding to what you learn - adaptive management. With simple participatory activities he checked whether the farmers understood. They do.

Despite the skepticism of many scientists, John knows communities can monitor and therefore manage how they use their resources for the long term. This, he believes is the key to sustainable use and conservation being mutually supportive instead of at odds. Monitoring one "resource" such as butterflies is only a microcosm of how the Hatam are trying to apply the same watchful eye and control over a larger area and all resources, often in seeming competition with the government and even conservationists like WWF-IP. In the end conservation projects, even governments come and go, but the communities are there for the long haul. Through monitoring they become aware of changes and can seek solutions if they are observe that things aren't going as expected -- before it is too late.

A few days after the workshop John and some farmers, including "Daud of the angry eyes" thrashed through the woods to measure the scarce distribution of Aristolochia near the boundary of reserve. The farmers were clearly able to apply what John had taught them. Later Daud took John to his forest gardens where he had planted Aristolochia and caterpillars hung like grapes from the vine. Daud assessed the health of the vines and looked for signs of pests, or the chaw marks of larval butterflies and recorded his findings. "Mon-i- TOR-ing" exclaimed Daud with a piano keyboard smile. And he gave John two thumbs up.

 

Tenure Hanging in the Balance

But even though the Hatam have taken day to day control of their lives and livelihoods, the unresolved issue of tenure remained a source of tension. The staff at the butterfly cooperative blamed WWF for the confusion. The main government official dealing with the Hatam was a man named Daud Wommesin, of the Ministry of Forestry. Years ago Wommesin worked for WWF. Recently in his new incarnation as a government employee, he won a prestigious environmental award from the president which leads Saragih to believe that he has considerable influence. Saragih was lobbying Wommesin hard to return to Igya ser Hanjop and to give the Hatam total rights to manage the land.

When I asked Daud Wommesin what he knew of the story he shook his head ruefully, "That was not handled very sensitively," he said referring to the altercation in the forest between the government workers and the Hatam. Wommesin was a hard read but after two long conversations I thought I understood something. Although he was careful not to say so, I concluded that Wommesin wants neither the government nor the Hatam to develop the reserve. He is a conservationist who wants the reserve to remain intact. "So," I said,"you think, ambiguity about the status is a good thing for the wildlife. Nobody owns it, nobody can use it." Wommesin looked at me hard and drew on his cigarette.

 

The Experiment's Results

There is an Indonesian expression: not only did I fall off the ladder, but then the ladder fell on me. First the rupiah tumbled, going from Rp 3500 to Rp 11,000 to the US dollar. Then, nature kicked the ladder. In the wake of El Nino, forests burned out of control and a prolonged drought dried up the rice paddies. The butterfly farming was climbing the ladder, until the economic crisis made it fall off. Indonesia's economic crisis is breeding an ecological one because as poverty and population increases, nature comes under ever increasing pressure.

We now realize that the butterfly farms alone will never be able to totally sustain the Arfak population of 15,000 Hatam. In 1994, the butterfly income accounted for 75% of the cash income of the 22 Hatam villages. But by 1998, on average just 40 - 50% was derived from butterfly sales partially because of the devalued rupiah but also for other reasons.

The farmers are starting to diversify their earnings based on what they learned from the butterfly business. Growing and selling peanuts for example is a new income generation initiative that was an offshoot of the butterfly enterprise. The butterfly enterprise, is as one farmer told me, " a little bait on the end of a fishing rod which can make a big catch." More than anything the butterfly cooperative has helped the Hatam organize, and is a foundation upon which many more things are being built. Butterfly farming is also changing the Hatam's mindset. To the Hatam ranching and selling butterflies is much more than a business, it is the hard path to self respect.

The Hatam are increasingly proud of what they can do and have new confidence in their abilities. Through simple resource monitoring techniques taught to them by John, they are keeping watch over their own resources with diligence and far-sightedness that goes beyond what anyone -- except BCN -- expected.

What are the lessons for conservationists? Enterprise as a means to conservation can work - but never on its own. There are other conditions critical to success including leadership, supportive government policies, and probably the single most important factor is who owns the resources -- which in this case, isn't clear.

If the Hatam don't believe they control the future of their resources, they have no incentive not to exploit them like any outsider would. The Hatam are truly trying to "keep watch over their butterflies," a microcosm of their efforts to control all their resources -- in competition with the government and even conservationists. Conservation projects and governments come and go, but the communities are there for the long haul.

I think this conservation experiment has done much good for the Hatam. I am less certain about the butterflies. In the short term, the ranching may have actually increased local populations of birdwings, which were reportedly not as common before. But in the long term the butterflies are in a precarious situation if conservation is based on a totally utilitarian view. If appreciating the butterflies for their own sake has no part in the equation, what's to say that the Hatam won't embark on other enterprises that could spell the end for the butterflies. When anyone intervenes in another culture, there's really no telling what direction things will go -- it's the law of unintended outcomes.

The Hatam are applying new skills to pursue their own aspirations and values. As BCN's Bernd Cordes said, "We start with butterflies, but what's to say the Hatam won't go to logging because of what we've done ... because butterflies don't offer enough. What was enough at first is not enough later. As long as the Hatam see a substantial value, my fear is they will go there. It's never enough. People always want more."

But if the butterflies, birds and forests lose, who wins?

****

 

Hiking through the Arfak rainforest, the birds are tantalizingly abundant but hard to see in trees tall as skyscrapers. Cicadas grind on like a chorus of tiny table saws, interrupted by the raucous shrieks of sulfur cockatoos and the whoops of birds of paradise. Marsupials - tree kangaroos and cuscuses - clamber up and down the trees' dizzying heights with the help of prehensile tails. On the ground, a long nosed, spiny echnida, an egg laying mammal, snuffles through the undergrowth, feeding on worms. We watch a pretty little torrent flycatcher nabbing red dragonflies above a fast flowing stream. And everywhere flit butterflies. Mind blowing butterflies. If you were to tear a year's worth of days off a calendar, throw the pages into the wind and watch them flutter away, you might get a sense of their diversity. John sketches them to remember. For a long time we don't talk. Finally John breaks the silence. "This is as close to Eden as we'll find on Earth," he says.

 

The next day, we begin the long hike back towards Manokwari, along the tangled root path that serves as a butterfly transport highway. We pass Hatam carrying butterflies down and heavy supplies up the mountains. "Cheemo" [For what it's worth, Acemoo is how the guys in Arfak write it in their e-mails to me] we greet each other. I can see why selling butterflies is a better idea than Bombay onions. We are at about 5,000 feet of elevation when some farmers stop Daud. Daud motions us to leave our packs and we follow the farmers, thrashing through the jungle to a clearing. In the centre is a perfect cone-shaped hut about waist high. This is the bower of the Vogelkop Bowerbird -- found only in Arfak. Unlike the male bird of paradise who wears his glory, the little bower bird male lavishly overcompensates for his plain looks by building a palatial boudoir. The male weaves this elegant dome and then landscapes a front lawn with torn up moss. A deck paved with bright red berries extends out about three feet. On it, the bird lays out his hopeful offerings -- a pile of yellow chrysanthemums neatly stacked in one corner, some flattened blue batteries in another, some brightly coloured feathers. The bower is only for love. The eggs are hidden elsewhere. There are not many of these birds left. We stay for a long time, the male flying about, clucking in irritation. We are cramping his style. When we finally leave, Daud explains we should pay the farmers. The reason that no-one has killed this bird, is that they hope to make money. If we don't pay up, they may kill it. John and I pay.

 

Toward evening we come to a tear in the forest canopy, cut by a large river. As we wade across and clamber up the other bank, a whooshing like [not sure what word is missing here] of steam engines swivels our heads up in time to see a flock of 50 Blyth's hornbills streaming across the spotlight of the moon. They flap with necks outstretched, their knobbed heads and heavy wings pushing noisily through the air. I have rarely seen a hornbill, never mind 50. Hornbills are highly vulnerable to habitat loss, poaching, and being eaten. I take this sighting as a sign of hope for the future. Daud, our guide beams at my excitement and his own. For the first time, he is seeing hornbills magnified ten times by Zeiss binoculars.

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