New Avian Records Along the Elevation Gradient of the Cyclops Mountains, New Guinea, Revealed by Camera Trapping

Journal article

New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island, supports the planet’s richest insular avifauna. Large areas of New Guinea remain poorly surveyed, however, in part due to the island’s challenging terrain. In hard-to-access areas, like many mountainous parts of New Guinea, automated surveying tools, like camera traps, may be especially helpful to address the survey deficit. Here we present the results of a camera-trap survey of the avifauna of the Cyclops Mountains, a range in New Guinea’s western, Indonesian provinces (Indonesian Papua). To our knowledge, our results represent only the second published camera-trap survey of birds from Indonesian Papua. We deployed 73 camera traps along an elevation gradient (143–1963 m) of the Cyclops Mountains for 11,869 camera-trap nights, recording 22 bird species from 1696 independent detections. Our species list is, to our knowledge, the first to include observations from the upper northern slopes of the Cyclops Mountains. It documents the first record of Masked Bowerbird (Sericulus aureus) in the range and provides photographic rediscoveries of two ‘lost’ species: Mayr’s Honeyeater (Ptiloprora mayri) and Mayr’s Forest Rail (Rallicula mayri). We also report substantial elevation range extensions for several species, including numerous records of Northern Cassowary (Casuarius unappendiculatus) over 1000 m above its historically known elevation ceiling. These findings provide new insights into species distributions and ecological flexibility in New Guinea’s montane systems, highlighting the potential for previously undocumented biodiversity in under-surveyed regions. Although camera traps detected fewer species than traditional ornithological methods, they were effective in documenting several elusive, ground-dwelling bird species, highlighting their value as a complementary tool for ornithological research in challenging terrain like New Guinea. Finally, we use our data to publish an updated bird species checklist for the Cyclops Mountains.

Authors: Kempton, JA; Balázs, A; Bessoran, Y; Dalimunthe, Y; Dharmayanthi, AB

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: MDPI
• Journal: Birds
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 27
• Article number: 27
• Publication date: 2026-04-23
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-20
• DOI: 10.3390/birds7020027
• EISSN: 2673-6004
• ISSN: 2673-6004
• Language: English
• Keywords: elevation gradient; honeyeater; rail; biodiversity darkspot; bowerbird; range extension; camera-trap; Indonesian Papua; New Guinea; lost species; cassowary