Qualla: Foja Mountains

Foja Mountains: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In December 2005, a helicopter touched down on a boggy lakebed somewhere above 1,000 meters in the Foja Mountains of northern Papua. Eleven scientists climbed out carrying cameras, specimen jars, and the permits - six of them, painstakingly obtained - that made this one of the most legally complicated field expeditions in recent memory. They had come looking for what nobody had ever documented. Within a month they had found honeyeaters with scarlet wattles that nobody had described, twenty new frog species, a long-lost bird of paradise, and western long-beaked echidnas - one of the world's most primitive egg-laying mammals - that calmly allowed themselves to be picked up. An animal does not behave this way unless it has never encountered a predator that looks like a human. The scientists, in other words, had found somewhere people had never been.

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Foja Mountains: The Largest Roadless Forest in Asia-Pacific

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Foja Mountains - also written Foya, also sometimes mapped only as the eastern edge of the Gauttier Range - rise to 2,193 meters just north of the Mamberamo River basin in Indonesian Papua. Three thousand square kilometers of the interior consist of old-growth tropical rainfor...

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Foja Mountains: Why Nobody Had Come

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The mountains had almost no recorded visitors before 1979. The reasons are structural. Much of the Foja range and the nearby Van Rees Mountains are too steep for conventional logging and too dangerous for any kind of mechanized access. There are no roads, and building one would m...

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Foja Mountains: Lost World

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What the 2005 team documented reads like a naturalist's fever dream. A new species of honeyeater, later formally described in 2007 as the wattled smoky honeyeater Melipotes carolae. Twenty previously undescribed frogs. Four new butterflies. Five new palms. A new scented white-flo...

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Foja Mountains: Return Expeditions

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Scientists came back in December 2007 and found two more new species: a giant rat in the genus Mallomys weighing about 1.4 kilograms - roughly five times the mass of a common brown rat - and a pygmy possum in the genus Cercartetus, described by the researchers as one of the world...

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Foja Mountains: A Climate and a Buffer

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Even at elevation, the Foja range stays warm - January and July temperatures still average around 20 degrees Celsius, and relative humidity runs from 73 to 87 percent. The rainy season runs December through March, but rain can fall any month of the year. The range sees more than ...

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