Evolution has produced so many wonders. This one, the Ribbon-tailed Astrapia, is endemic to Papua New Guinea where this male was photographed by Mark Harper in the Tari Valley.
INTRODUCTION
This website is about what remains of the beautiful world we live in on this planet we call Earth. It has been designed to be a guiding light, to the best bits of that beautiful world, where, unlike many areas of the planet, birds and other wildlife still thrive. We hope the information encourages you to visit the destinations presented and helps you to plan and execute successful and enjoyable trips to them. In turn, we also hope that your visits will help to ensure that the habitats at the destinations are conserved for the birds and other wildlife they support.
In the beginning, about 14,000 million years ago, there was just gas; mainly atoms of hydrogen and helium. Then, during the course of millions of years, gravity, light and charged particles combined to form the first stars, and the heat generated inside such stars made new, different, atoms, and some of the stars exploded and the supernovae spewed out the new atoms and from the interstellar debris spinning around other stars planets formed. About 9,500 million years after the Universe formed, 4,500 million years ago, some interstellar atoms and dust combined to form a planet we call Earth.
Life on Earth began when the planet was about 4,000 million years old, 500 million years ago. To begin with Earth had no atmosphere and it was too hot to support any form of life but over thousands of millions of years the rocks cooled down and released gases which helped form an atmosphere. There was no oxygen at first though and life came to be in the oceans, probably as a result of atoms accidentally colliding and combining. Then, over the course of millions of more years, single-celled organisms evolved and became abundant in the oceans then after millions of more years some of these became more complex and evolved into molluscs then some evolved into crustaceans then some, about 400 million years ago, into the first fish. Meanwhile the micro-organisms were consuming various materials and releasing oxygen, eventually changing the planet’s atmosphere and enabling the evolution of amphibians, insects, reptiles, mammals, flowering plants and birds, in that order.
It was about 500 million years after life appeared in the oceans, about seven million years ago, when evolution came up with a group of life forms resembling humans. As far as we humans know, the Australopithecines, as we have called them, emerged from the tropical forests of West Africa and ventured on to the East African plains. They were more ape than human though and nearly another seven million years passed until, about 160,000-200,000 years ago, we, modern humans, were born. We have since spread all over the planet, displacing all other human species including the Neanderthals. We have appeared and we will disappear, and the Earth will remain, until our star, the Sun, expands and engulfs it, in about 6,000 million years time.
During the course of 14,000 million years, via the chance combination of countless biological, chemical and physical factors, and innumerable strokes of good fortune we - packages of trillions of drifting atoms or stardust called humans - have not only come to the wonderfully agreeable but grossly under-appreciated state known as existence, we have also come to be able to appreciate that we and every other living thing exists.
We have evolved eyes through which we can see the world around us and they together with our brains tell us what we can see, and we have a language with words to describe what we can see, and we can see and say that we live in a beautiful world.