Years ago, working as a new keeper in a reptile/bird house, I was struck by a curious fact. Many of the animals that I was most fascinated by - the feathered and the scaled - had one thing in common. They came from the same place, an island that I had heard of, but knew little of beyond the name. That island is New Guinea.
If I knew little of New Guinea, I'm not in poor company. It's an island shrouded in mystery to most of the world, renowned in popular culture for its headhunters and stone-age civilizations, scattered across jungles and isolated highland valleys - so isolated that many cultures are cut off from each other completely (New Guinea is home to one-tenth of the world's spoken languages, even though it is not much bigger than California). That same isolation has led to the evolution of some spectacular wildlife.
Few people know the wildlife of New Guinea better than Tim Flannery of the Australian Museum. Flannery has literally written the book on New Guinea's mammals - which is just as well, because he's discovered several of them, including several species of tree kangaroo and a giant bat that was previously believed to have been extinct since the Ice Age. Throwim Way Leg is not that book. Instead, it is the story of how Flannery first came to New Guinea - so close to his native Australia, yet totally different - and spent a large chunk of his professional life exploring the hills, valleys, and forests of the island.
In pidgin - the lingua franca of New Guinea - "Throwim Way Leg" means "To Start a Journey" (literally, you are throwing your leg out to take the first step). Flannery's journey takes him across several years and several locales on New Guinea as he seeks to understand wildlife that has, in many cases, never been documented before. It's not the Jane Goodall world of field biology - finding your animals, following them, and spending the day jotting down what they do as they gradually come to accept you. Instead, it's a detective story - searching for the faintest of clues - sometimes something concrete, like a claw in a villager's possession, sometimes just a rumor. Some of the animals he studies he actually encounters, watching them in the wild. Some he even captures (with a few specimens going on to zoos, where their behavior can be studied by scientists). Many remain phantoms, with just a few pieces of bone from a hunter's collection to go on. From that, Flannery must extrapolate what animals there are, where they are found, and how endangered they are.
Throwim Way Leg isn't just the story of wildlife, however... and it's not just the story of Tim Flannery. Like every tale of field biology, it's the story of people - in this case, the people of the two nations that make up that island. New Guineans are often portrayed in popular culture (to the extent that they are at all) as naked cannibals in a constant state of tribal warfare. Flannery's years in the bush and in the village reveal a network of complex cultures full of complex peoples. There are enormous differences between their ways and Western ways, but Flannery is as almost as skilled of an anthropologist as he is a mammalogist. Most importantly, he truly likes the people he meets and wants to share their stories and their cultures with the world, as well as to use his book as a bullhorn to alert the world to some of the struggles and injustices that they are facing today.
Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds - On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea at Amazon.com
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