Rediscovery of the
Bruijn's Brush-turkey

by Kris Tindige

In March 1999, the Waigeo Expedition 1999 was organised, first, to carry out an intensive search to rediscover the 'long lost' Aepypodius bruijnii, and, second, to do a bird inventory in general. It was  followed by the second Waigeo Expedition in 2000.

Almost all Waigeo villages were surveyed and several treks into the nearly inaccessible, rugged and densely forested interior of the island (total surface about 3200 km²) were done. We provided local people with illustrations of the Bruijn's Brush-turkey and urged them to report any sights to Kris Tindige, the chairman of the Papua Bird Club, the Indonesia counterpart in Sorong, and the nearest contact.

Yenbekaki, a village unvisited by the previous expeditions, was one of our best targets for exploration. We made field trips into its forest interior with local people who mainly depend on the forest for a livelihood, including hunting, bird trapping and doing selective logging to produce planks, etc, which they sell at Sorong. The people were very helpful and supplied us with useful information. After the trip, we left the villagers more clear illustrations of the bird and tried to motivate them to report any findings.

This finally brought an excellent result. On , a pighunter from Yenbekaki brought the head and bones of a 'Mangkwap' (the local name for the Bruijn's brush-turkey) as remains of their meal to Kris Tindige, who immediately preserved the materials in alcohol. These remains were carefully studied and compared to other Megapodes, using photos, measurements and illustrations from literature by Heij, Post and Tindige. Heij and Post, the Dutch members of the Waigeo Expeditions, studied in 1999 the mounted specimens of Bruijn's brush-turkey and other closely related Megapode-species in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History (New York) and Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense (Java-Indonesia).

The Waigeo Expedition 2001 was mounted by Kees Heij and Hans Post, to research, together with Kris Tindige, the remains of the bird in Sorong. After this the place where the bird was caught was visited to collect more information.

Dogs trapped the bird near a small stream between hills that were used by nickel mining 25 years ago. Because of its heavy weight and injures, the bird was not able to fly to the next set of hills (4-8 m wide with the stream), to save his life. Instead, it fell down and was not able to move, and as a result one of its legs was injured by the dog.

To reach the location, we walked some few hours, following the hunting trails and throughout the Werar River (located between Yenbekaki and Puper). The stream rises approximately to 100m in elevation.

Megapodes Megapodiidae is the only family of birds which exhibits peculiar and unique breeding habits: they use external heat sources (instead of body heat) to incubate their eggs. Some species bury their eggs in the sand of sun-drenched beaches (like sea-turtles) and let the heat produced by the sun incubate the eggs, while others build huge mounds of leaf litter to lay their eggs in, where heat produced by rotting leaves causes eggs to hatch. Megapode chicks emerge fully self-supporting and are immediately able to fly.

Within this family there are 22 species which are distributed over Australia, Papua New Guinea, East-Indonesia, the Philippines, the Nicobar Islands and some islands in the Southwest-Pacific (Tonga, the Marianas, Palau). Most species occur in the Indo-Australian region where they inhabit tropical (mountain) forests. The highest diversity of the species is found in New Guinea and Australia (Jones et all. 1995).

One of New Guinea species is Bruijn's Brush-turkey, Aepypodius bruijnii, endemic to Waigeo Island off Northwest New Guinea (Irian Jaya) Indonesia. Bruijn's Brush-turkey is the only megapode which has never been observed alive by western scientists, despite the effort of about 15 expeditions in search of this 'lost species'. The bird is only known from 23 specimens (all collected on Waigeo) kept in the collections of natural history museums in the United States and Europe. Towards the end of the 20th century the specimen-count was 15 (Jones et al. 1995), but six additional specimens were recently discovered in the Muséum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris (Voisin et al. 2000), one in The Natural History Museum, Tring (Dekker 2000) and in November 1999 the Dutch team of the Waigeo Expedition (Heij & Post) found seven, instead of the six specimens listed in Jones et al. (1995), in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. All but one or two of these birds were collected around 1880 by hunters employed by the Dutch plumassier A.A. Bruijn on the island of Waigeo. The last 'sign of life' of the species dates back to 1938 when Jusup Khakiaj (Dillon Ripley's field-assistant) obtained a single bird on Waigeo for the collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (Meyer de Schauensee 1940; Ripley 1942).

Although we did not actually see the bird in the wild, we did establish the ongoing existence of Bruijn's brush-turkey on Waigeo. Any doubt about the occurrence of the species on Waigeo belongs to the past. Future expeditions should focus on finding Bruijn's brush-turkeys in their breeding habitat and get any information about its behaviour, ecology, distribution, population size and threats

Acknowledgements: The Waigeo Expeditions 1999, 2000 and 2001 are the result of a long-term   corporation between Stichting Moluccan & Papuan Wildlife Conservation Ecoguide Fund, (a Dutch foundation) and Papua Bird Club, (Sorong, Papua/Irian Jaya, Indonesia). The complete teams are : Dr. Cornelis. J. Heij, Hans Post, Frans Advocaat, Kris Tindige (1999), C.J. Heij, H. Post, C.W. Moeliker, K. Tindige (2000) and C.J. Heij, H. Post, K. Tindige (2001).

We warmly thank the entire Waigeo people, especially the Yenbekaki villagers. Also to Abraham Sangaji, our very experience motorist, Simon Kafiar and Yance, with their 'old good' Kummeser II, a motorised dugout canoe. Unmaintained engines became our main problem with 'our' Kummeser, but not the boat itself. The boat was very nice and safe though required a good deal of exercise to use. My 10 years of exploring New Guinean waters were mostly spent on such wooden boats.

On behalf of the Indonesian counterpart, the Papua Bird Club would like to deeply thank the Dutch members of the expeditions for their great help and for being very good companions.