Birds Of Paradise

The males are the flashy ones. They puff up their chests, shifting and shaking their feathered bodies in hopes of enthralling the dowdier females. Wings flare in a colorful display, and Tim Laman and Edwin Scholes are there, ready to capture it all. The camera shutter clicks, and the duo marks another bird of paradise off their list.

The birds of paradise are a family of 39 species of exotic and highly individual birds that live in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. Lack of large predators, relative remoteness and the lush environment there led to a Darwinian experiment that created these ornate birds and their wackily endearing courtship displays. As Laman says, “We might think of this as survival of the sexiest.”

Laman, a wildlife photojournalist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, pitched the idea of documenting these amazing creatures to National Geographic and when he got the green light, he sought a partner to help him. Scholes, a Cornell University ornithologist, was already working on field research on birds of paradise, and so the team was built. Together, they dedicated eight years to hacking through dense jungles, sinking into muck and climbing into forest canopies to document these creatures, some of which had never been seen by outsiders before they began their work. The dedication is stunning, as evidenced by the numbers: Those eight years of work encompassed 18 expeditions for a total of 544 days at 51 field sites to capture 39,568 photographs, which led the pair to becoming the first people to document all 39 species.