A FEMALE HUON tree kangaroo and her nearly full-grown joey peer down at the photographer from a moss-covered tree branch. This rare mammal is found only on New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula.

nificent cloud forest where every sur- face seemed to be dripping with moss. From there, we dropped down into a smaller river valley and back up before reaching a campsite at about 8,500 feet. There I met Brett Benz, an ornithologist from the University of Kansas who studies bowerbirds. He had arrived a week before and was camped with local field assistants. Brett had good news. In fruiting

trees near the camp, he’d been seeing many Huon astrapias—one of the bird species I was looking for—and had possibly found a tree where the birds display. For the next week, cap- turing images of this remarkable crea- ture becamemy primary task, andmy efforts were well rewarded. As for the other two species—

Wahnes’ parotia and the emperor bird of paradise—the birds eluded me on that first trip to the Huon. With help from villagers, I at least spotted emperor birds of paradise, but my tim- ing was off: Because the breeding sea- son was over, the males had lost their plumes. Severalmonths later, I did suc- cessfully capture both species with my camera when I returned with Edwin Scholes of the Cornell Lab ofOrnithol- ogy, one of the world’s leading field researchers on birds of paradise. My luckwith tree kangarooswas bet-

ter.About aweek intomy first trip,Vic- tor, a tracker for the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program, arrived at our camp and offered to take me out the next day to search for the animals. My chance of spotting one of these very rare creatures onmy ownwas basically nil, so I accepted the invitation. BecauseVictor Eki and the research teamhad captured and radio-collared several kangaroos earlier in the season, hewould be able to use the animals’ signals to find them. The next morning, we set off on a

two-hour hike up to nearly 10,000 feet, where the forest was even