These flamboyant birds are the 17,000th species to enter Nat Geo's Photo Ark
Birds-of-paradise have captivated the planet with their elaborate plumage and idiosyncratic mating dances. Some species appear to shape-shift as they elongate plumes of feathers, fan their wings, or even hang upside down from a tree branch like a bat.
There are about 40 species in the birds-of-paradise family, and all are native to either Papua New Guinea, its surrounding islands, or Australia.
'They're like no other birds on earth,' says Joel Sartore, National Geographic Explorer, photographer, and creator of Photo Ark.
Since 2006, Sartore has been traveling the globe in a bid to document as many species as humanly possible. And as of this writing, he has approached a number that once seemed unthinkable—17,000 species lovingly coaxed into posing for his camera. Usually, Sartore and his team select one species to highlight as the milestone, but with birds-of-paradise, he says, 'It was just impossible for us to choose.'
Recently returned from a trip to Port Moresby, Sartore tried to convey what it was like to sit in the presence of so many of these flamboyantly feathered creatures.
'Everything was interesting to me,' says Sartore. 'They were really calm, all of them, and usually if a bird's calm in my tent, they're pretty smart.'
He recalled one bird-of-paradise in particular—an iridescent turquoise and purple bird known as the trumpet manucode (Phonygammus keraudrenii mayrii)—that stared right back at him with its huge, cherry-red eyeball.
'He's seeing himself in the reflection of the light lens filter,' explains Sartore.
This is one of the goals of every shoot Sartore does with his simple backgrounds and closeup approach: 'We go with the black-and-white backgrounds to eliminate all distractions and look animals in the eye. It also gives all animals an equal voice, because there's no size comparison,' he says.
'This little king bird-of-paradise,' says Sartore of a bright-red species only slightly larger than a dollar bill, 'he's as big as an elephant.' A trumpet manucode, Phonygammus keraudrenii mayrii, photographed at Port Moresby Nature Park.
Looking across the assortment of birds featured here, you'll notice that each species is vastly different from the others, either in color, shape, or feather arrangement. And when these males start to strut for the local females, you'll see that each species also has its own way of wooing the opposite sex.
So how did all these closely related birds become so strikingly different?
'Evolution by sexual selection has 'permitted' the evolution of extravagant feathers and behaviors because the fruit they eat is abundant, and the predators that often counterbalance extravagant evolution are absent,' says Edwin Scholes, an ornithologist, and founder and leader of the Cornell Lab's Birds-of-Paradise Project.
Interestingly, while it's the male birds and their fancy feathers we tend to focus upon, it's the female birds-of-paradise that are doing the choosing—which means they're the ones actually responsible for the evolution of such extraordinary traits.
Habitat and geography also play a role, of course. 'Birds-of-paradise are sedentary forest dwellers and don't disperse or migrate long distances, so even a lowland river valley is a barrier to a montane species. And none fly over open water to islands,' says Scholes.
Separated from each other and unencumbered by predators, birds-of-paradise have been free to break off into ever more enchanting species. Some have incredibly oversized features, such as the ribbon-tailed astrapia, which has tailfeathers three times as long as its body. Others, such as the superb bird of paradise, can make their feathers click while dancing. And the growling riflebird? It's known for its, well, growl—something you definitely don't hear every day from a bird.
One species, the lesser superb bird-of-paradise, has even been shown to sport feathers that absorb around 99.95 percent of all visible light—a quality scientists call ultrablack or superblack.
Add it all up, and Scholes says birds-of-paradise are 'some of the most beautiful, bizarre, and diverse [birds] on the planet.'
The good news for these fantastic birds is that they are doing better than many other species found in the Photo Ark.
'Thankfully, no species are currently in the critically endangered category,' says Scholes, though he admits some need more thorough assessment. While none of the species shown here are considered endangered, around one-fifth of all birds-of-paradise species are listed as either vulnerable or near threatened.
'The species that are most at risk or most vulnerable are those that are found only on relatively small islands just offshore from mainland New Guinea, and some that are found at the higher elevations of isolated mountain ranges,' says Scholes.
Overall, Sartore says he hopes the images in the Photo Ark will remind people that there is so much life on this planet worth saving.
'We'll go wherever we can to just show people what life was all about and hopefully it makes a difference,' he says. 'That's kind of the whole point—just get people's attention, get them to think about something other than politics and sports for a little bit.'
'And that as these species go away,' says Sartore, 'so could we.'
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Conditions for the pochard's survival were bleak, she recalls. Fires smoldered as people cleared forests around the lake to plant rice fields. Fowlers strung nets across the water to catch waterbirds, a hundred at a time, to sell in the markets to the country's quickly growing population. None held a pochard. Wilmé, who was pregnant at the time, had to hire rowers to help her explore the lake. 'I spent many hours on the lake—in canoes, walking the marshes, working with local fishermen,' she says. 'If you were a pochard, where would you go where you could be absent from threats and people?' Such a place, it seemed to Wilmé, 'didn't exist anymore.' She printed pictures of the pochard on T-shirts and flyers, distributing them in villages and schools. The word was out. In 1991 Wilmé's campaign yielded a surprise. A fowler caught a duck he'd never seen before and showed it to other duck hunters and fishermen in the area. None of them recognized it. But they did remember the public campaign and advised the fowler to bring it to Wilmé. It was a male pochard. Wilmé's account in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club was hopeful: 'The finding of a single Madagascar pochard on Lake Alaotra indicates a remnant population may still exist.' The discovery launched a yearlong search of a wider area around Lake Alaotra in hopes of finding a remnant population of the birds. No success. And the single duck, cared for in a special aviary with a fenced-in pond, died in 1992. A necropsy conducted by London Zoo and Chicago Field Museum specialists indicated that an aerial fungus may have afflicted the duck. Once he was gone, it seemed the species was lost again—this time for good. Over a decade later, in 2004, the pochard's obituary was tentatively pronounced. At London's Linnean Society, it was biologist Young who reluctantly raised the possibility that the pochard's classification might include the dreaded words 'probably extinct.' 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We need to confirm the photo to our boss in the U.S.,' he says. They traveled for two days back to a spot with internet connection to email his photos of the pochards to the Peregrine Fund's headquarters in Idaho. The photos were pinged across to the Atlantic to Young, who would quickly board a plane—once again, and this time with great hope—to Madagascar. Three groups—the Peregrine Fund, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust—almost immediately began working with Madagascar's government to get the lake recognized as a protected site. The groups trained locals to work as field staff, monitoring the flock until a breeding program could be established. 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To let the eggs incubate with the parents as long as possible, the team of scientists, including species recovery and breeding experts from the three organizations, planned to arrive a few days before the ducklings hatched and wait until the final day before hatching to take the eggs. That way they'd be incubated by the parents as long as possible. Any further delay, however, would increase the possibility that the eggs would hatch and ducklings would dart into the reeds, never to be found. The first delay struck over the Indian Ocean, where a storm forced the team's flight back to Kenya. By the time they reached Madagascar two days later, several members of the team had contracted swine flu. A swollen river had washed out a bridge, leading to a further delay. Finally, a 15-hour drive in trucks laden with generators, heat lamps, portable incubators, and duckling crumb—pellets of ground duck food bolstered with vitamins and protein—got them to a highland hotel in the town of Antsohihy, where they would establish a base camp by persuading the owner to let them turn one room into a temporary duck-breeding facility. Their final stretch: eight hours on a rutted oxcart path eroded by rain. The delayed team arrived the night before the ducks were due to hatch. They set up tents and a campsite incubator. The next morning, as they walked toward the lake, awaiting a blessing of a village elder, they saw a different very rare bird pass over their heads—the Madagascar marsh harrier. It dove straight into the reeds. The horror of what was happening struck them as the soon-to-be-endangered harrier rose with a thought-to-be-extinct species of duckling in its talons. The team thought they had 'blown it,' recalls Peter Cranswick, project manager for the pochard effort with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, an organization that in the 1950s pioneered captive-breeding techniques to help save the world's rarest goose, the Hawaiian nene. The eggs had already hatched, the rare ducklings had scattered, and one was already dead and being carried off. The team, sitting disconsolate at the side of the lake, had been recording the morning's mission. A distraught Young spoke into the video camera. 'We've always thought that harriers were potentially the biggest threat,' he said, his voice catching. But two of the team members paddled out to investigate. Minutes later, they radioed back. The eggs were still in the nest. The dead duckling was from a different—and unknown—clutch of eggs. Eight eggs were collected, and they hatched that night inside the campsite incubator. 'We know that for 48 hours they are tough,' Young says. 'They are living on reserves from being in the egg. That's why we move them in that window.' By daybreak, eight pochard ducklings were traveling in a heavily padded, mesh-covered cooler along that rutted road toward a new life—one focused on keeping their species alive. The 'least worst option' By 2012 the number of captive-bred ducks had grown from eight to some four dozen, and the team began looking for the ducks' new home. After surveying over 24 lakes and finding all heavily farmed and fished, they settled on Lake Sofia, the 'least worst option,' according to Cranswick. Fifteen thousand people in eight villages lived around Lake Sofia at the time, a fraction of the population around other lakes. Chances were as good as they got. Cranswick details one early meeting with farmers to enlist their support for the project. One farmer stood up and said he heard the foreigners were doing all these things for the villages because they wanted to put a duck on the lake. There were concerns. Does this duck eat rice? No. Will the ducks fly into farmers' rice fields? No. Would this big project help them protect their own resources? The answer was yes. Cranswick recalls the farmer thinking it over for a moment before agreeing to help. 'OK,' he said. 'Bring the duck!' Lake Sofia, as well as the remote volcanic lake, would soon be protected by the government, globally recognized on the Ramsar Convention's list of Wetlands of International Importance. Land rights for farmers would see great protections as well. Over the next five years the local community, scientists, and government collaborated to make Lake Sofia as healthy as possible. They introduced farming techniques that reduced the use of pesticides, planted trees, adopted fishing practices with less impact on waterbirds, and created loan programs to encourage climate-smart agriculture. The first ever captive-bred flock of pochards was released in 2018 on Lake Sofia. 'It's just a small brown duck,' says Sarah-Louise Adams, delivery and impact manager for field programs at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. But it's 'a flagship species to restore an entire wetland.' Eighty descendants from that flock and others that have been released are now living on Lake Sofia, and in 2023 six ducks that had flown from there were spotted at their ancestral home, Lake Alaotra, prompting excited bulletins from scientists. But the fight to keep their population growing and their wetlands healthy remains a struggle. Last year Lake Sofia shrunk from a surface area of over 500 acres to less than two acres, just 15 inches deep, after heavy storms damaged the banks of the lake, causing it to drain. In December the community raced to build a temporary dam from sticks and mud before the rainy season hit, maintaining the lake with stored rainwater until a permanent dam could be built. That new dam has since replenished much of the lake. Other challenges remain. An expedition last year to bring more pochards into the breeding program from the volcanic lake failed when scientists found just three nests; two were ravaged by rats and one was flooded. The road to the lake is also eroding further. The aim later this year is to hike the nearly 30 miles in and out with lighter, temperature-controlled hatchling boxes for eggs and ducklings to avoid the stress of the bumpy drive on the birds. Thanks to decades of work, there are now, as of this writing, an estimated 230 Madagascar pochards in existence. Biologist Young, one of the leaders of the effort, is now retired but continues to monitor the pochards' recovery. He is hopeful about other thought-to-be-extinct ducks—possibly in the far reaches of Russia, North Korea, and Myanmar—that fascinate scientists like him. 'Every now and again there are reports, unfortunately never photographs,' he says. One, the crested shelduck, has a tuft of green feathers on its head; the duck in in Myanmar is pink-headed. 'We always thought that if someone rediscovered the pink-headed duck, nobody would remember the pochard,' Young says. 'It is a beautiful duck.' Luckily, the pochard has very devout champions. As Langrand, the ornithologist who first began the search in the early '80s, says, if you look behind any story of saving a species, you'll find devoted people, from scientists and government officials to farmers, fowlers, and dambuilders. 'It takes individuals to carry the torch from beginning to end.' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
