QUEST FOR THE TREE KANGAROO:
AN EXPEDITION TO THE CLOUD FOREST OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0618496416

Read an Excerpt:

CHAPTER 1: A "BIG STUFFED ANIMAL" ON A STONE AGE ISLAND

It feels like we've walked into a living fairy tale.

Our heads are literally in the clouds. Though we're just a few degrees south of the equator, we're bathed in cool mist. We're 10,000 feet up in the mountains.

Here, the trees are cloaked in clouds. The ground is carpeted with thick, green moss. In the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea, ferns grow into trees-trees like those the dinosaurs knew. Moss and ferns, vines and orchids hang from branches like the beards of wise, old wizards.

In a place like this, we half expect a hobbit or a troll to show up. But it's even better than that. The animals who really do live here are even more fantastic-and directly above us is one of them.

"This is incredible!"

Lisa Dabek, forty-five, can't help but exclaim each time she sees one in the wild. She's the scientific leader of our research team, and she's fixed her binoculars on one of the rarest, strangest, and least-understood creatures on the planet. More than eighty feet above her, high in one of the tall, ancient trees, a kangaroo is looking down at us.

A kangaroo in a tree?

That's just what Lisa thought when she met her first tree kangaroo about twenty years ago.

That was at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. Lisa was a graduate student in animal behavior. She had never heard of a tree kangaroo before. But meeting one changed her life.

"It looked like a big stuffed animal!" she remembers. Or something that Dr. Suess might have dreamed up. Impossibly soft, with a rounded face, button eyes, pink nose, pert, upright ears and a long, thick tail, it was about the size of a small dog or an overweight cat, with plush brown and golden fur.

There were two of them-two mothers with tiny babies concealed in their pouches. They were as strange as they were adorable.

"They were like monkeys, up in the trees—but they weren't monkeys," she recalls.

"They looked a little like bears-but they weren't bears. And then they had a pouch for their babies-a totally different thing from most other mammals."

What she was looking at-and what we're seeing today above us in the tree-was a Matschie's ("Match-eez") tree kangaroo. It's one of 10 kinds of tree kangaroos on the planet. "I was totally intrigued," Lisa said. "I fell completely in love with these animals."

Lisa learned at the zoo that the Matschie's tree kangaroo is among the rarest creatures on earth-and getting rarer. As people cut down the cloud forest and killed more and more kangaroos, the species was disappearing. She decided to do something about it.

And that's what's brought Lisa-and us, a team of scientists and volunteers she's gathered from three continents to help her-on this quest to a remote and magical forest in the clouds. We've come to try to learn the secrets of these rare creatures. What do they eat? How many are left? What do they need to survive? We hope to find out the answers—before it's too late.

* * *