In the 1850’s the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace travelled to the remote Aru Archipelago in what is now the far eastern Indonesia, tracking down the source of some extraordinary bird specimens that had reached Europe decades before.  He was making his living as a specimen collector, but beyond that, his curiosity about the natural world drove him to want to see these birds in the wild, and understand how they used their extraordinary plumes.  So it was that Wallace became the first western naturalist to observe and describe the gathering of males in one tree to display together in what we now call a lek in the central Aru Islands, and write about it his book “The Malay Archipelago: Land of the Orangutan and the Bird of Paradise”.  That book was one of my inspirations for my early interest in birds-of-paradise.  So naturally I wanted to make a pilgrimage to the same area where Wallace had first seen them.  Fortunately, the forests of central Aru were still intact in 2010, and working with local village landowners, I was able to construct a blind in the canopy near the lek, and spend many mornings there.  This image captures a moment when two males are aligned on adjacent branches with plumes fully fanned, and are in the absolute peak moments of cooperative display.  It is an incredible sight to witness, and I can only imagine Wallace’s wonder and amazement at witnessing this for the first time.  This image is my tribute to Wallace’s discovery.

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