I’m Sy Montgomery and I’m going to read to you from Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea about the Matschie’s tree kangaroo. “The Matschies live in a lost world on a Stone Age island in a land that time forgot. That’s how people still describe New Guinea, it’s the second largest island on earth. Only one island, Greenland, is bigger.
Only the Amazon has more tropical rain forests, but New Guinea has many other different habitats for animals to live in besides tropical rain forest, from seashores to coral reefs to glaciers to cloud forests. New Guinea was mostly unexplored by outsiders until the middle of the 20th century and for good reason. The place is full of jungles, steep mountains, erupting volcanoes, dangerous mudslides, aggressive crocodiles, poisonous snakes, and tropical diseases.
The few explorers who survived expeditions there noted another hazard, the local people sometimes had people over had dinner, literally. Headhunting cannibal tribes sometimes ate people, clothes and all, except for their shoes. They gave the shoes to their pigs to eat. Things have changed. Headhunting fell out of fashion. It’s thought that nobody eats people there anymore.
But still, especially on the eastern half of the island, the nation known as Papua New Guinea, few roads mar the wilderness, ancient forests remain unexplored. New species are still being found. Here you’ll find birds that grow tall as a man. cassowaries remind you of dinosaurs. They sport tall helmets of bone growing up from their blue and black heads. Long, skinny black feathers hang from their bodies like hair.
Because they only have tiny stumps for wings, cassowaries can’t fly, but they sure can fight. They can leap into the air and slash at their enemies with claws as sharp as razors. Other birds like the pitohuis have poisonous feathers, and still others are so beautiful they’re called birds of paradise. Strange animals abound here. The triok is a beautiful black and white striped possum with a pink nose and huge black eyes. The fourth finger on each hand is more then twice as long as the others. All the better to fish grubs from holes in rotting trees. The echidna is a spine-covered, worm-eating mammal who lays eggs instead of giving birth to live babies. Dorcopsis is a fat little kangaroo who grows no longer then your forearm. The pademelon is another who sleeps in soft beds of grass.
The couscous lives in trees, its eyes are huge, its fur thick and soft. It holds onto branches with pink hands and a pink grasping tail. But perhaps the most amazing of them all is the Matschie’s tree kangaroo. It lives only in one place in the world, the cloud forest of the Huon Peninsula on the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea.
The western half of New Guinea is part of the much larger nation of Indonesia. New Guinea isn’t exactly the sort of place you’d expect a typical kid growing up in New York to end up, but Lisa Dabek wasn’t typical.<
