The official name of this exquisite bird just seems wrong!  How can anything so beautiful be “lesser” to anything?

Lesser Bird-of-paradise, (Paradisaea minor)

They are found exclusively on the island in New Guinea in the northern half of the island.  The similar looking larger Greater Bird of Paradise is in the southern part of the island.  For the eco-tourist, your best chance of seeing one is going with a highly skilled guide such as Pak Jamil in Nimbokrang.  I didn’t get a good look at one as during our visit they stayed deep in the trees but we could hear them calling.   Birding is never a sure thing, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t.  They do stay in their display area but sometimes the trees block your view and I didn’t have the gear to slosh through the mud to get a better view.

Distribution

This video shows their beauty up close!

The intriguing Twelve-wired Bird-of-paradise (Seleucidis melanoleucus) is widely distributed throughout New Guinea and Salawati Island of Indonesia.  I caught a glimpse of one in the swamp forest of Nimbokrang while birding with Jamil.  Much to my frustration, my camera battery had somehow gone flat overnight so I wasn’t able to get a pic of my own so have to rely on this one from Wikipedia.

Twelve-wired Bird-of-paradise

The best place to see the Twelve-wired Bird-of-paradise in in West Papua and visiting Nimbokrang you have the advantage of one of the top birding guides in Indonesia – Pak Jamil.  I will be doing a separate blog on how to organize this.

Distribution

There’s a lot of great information about them in this video with David Attenborough.