New Britain

New Britain is an island province of PNG, situated some 100km east of the south-eastern peninsula of the mainland. The island is a highly volcanic, arc-shaped land mass, 500km long but never more than 100km wide. Despite being relatively close to New Guinea, there is deep water between the two, and hence it displays both species impoverishment (not so good for visiting birders) and also a high degree of endemism (very good for visiting birders).

We flew from Port Moresby to the town of Hoskins on the north coast, and then drove an hour west to Kimbe Bay, where we settled in with glee to the fabulous Walindi Plantation Resort, a fully luxurious dive resort right on the beach - a good way to finish the trip!

Over three full days in the field, we crammed in lots of time in the field, visiting two forest sites, making two trips up to a nearby densely vegetated ridge (driving up the first time in a 4x4 through eight foot tall grass and cane!), and spending much of the middle day out on a dive boat, visiting several small islands in Kimbe Bay.

The forests turned up plenty of new birds, but also abundance - Eclectus Parrots were especially common and conspicuous, along with Blue-eyed Cockatoo, Red-knobbed and Yellow-tinted Imperial Pigeons, Knob-billed Fruit-dove, Variable Goshawk, Pied Coucal, Long-tailed Myna and lots more. Ashy and Splendid Myzomelas showed up, as did Northern Fantail, Red-banded Flowerpecker, Eastern Black-capped Lory and even the near-mythical White-mantled Kingfisher.

Pokili Forest was notable (a) for being very, very wet and (b) for producing excellent views of Melanesian Scrubfowl - our last new family of the trip. Also here, we had grim views of a roosting New Britain Boobook (or Hawk-owl) during a massive cloudburst , plus Black-tailed Monarch and Lesser Shining (or Velvet) Flycatcher, amongst commoner forest species.

The inshore pelagic day was fantastic. Bottle-nosed Dolphins rode our bow wave for a time, and we saw Great and Lesser Frigatebirds and Brown Booby out at sea. We snorkelled a coral wall over lunchtime - wonderful, fish-filled waters. Only afterwards did we see two Grey Reef Sharks patrolling nearby....gulp.

But the birds trumped everything - we scored with all our realistic 'island tramp species' targets. Top of the list was undoubtedly Nicobar Pigeon, but we also saw Beach and Collared Kingfishers, Yellow-bibbed Fruit-dove, Island Imperial Pigeon, Sclater's (or Scarlet-bibbed) Myzomela, Mangrove Golden Whistler, Island Monarch, Mackinlay's (or Spot-breasted) Cuckoo-dove and even Osprey.

Add to all this wealth of wildlife some excellent food at the hotel, very cold beer, friendly cats and dogs and some stunning scenery and sunrises/sets, and our time on New Britain was a fitting and most enjoyable climax to our PNG adventure.

We ended up having seen 352 species between us (plus 19 heard), of which an astonishing 94% were new - and we added 17 whole new families of birds too!

PNG really did live up to expectations - tough, often wet, a bit dodgy - but truly alien, exotic and crammed with some of the best birds we've ever seen.