Trogon Quest - an adventure in Sumatra with Albert Earl Gilbert

Harpactus mackloti AMNH 633878 adult male

“I was able to sketch several wild birds in the area, and carefully noted that all had bright yellow flanks without traces of orange. This painting, perhaps the first drawn from life, also shows the diagnostic maroon-chestnut lower back of the male. The upper tail can appear iridescent blue or green, depending on the angle of light.”

We were following our excellent birding guide, Dennis Yong, through the leech-infested montane rain forest near Berestagi, Sumatra. We were searching for one of the rarest and most beautiful birds of the world, the Sumatran Trogon. We’d been hiking for miles, and the leeches were ferocious. I pulled off about 45 of them in 45 minutes of hiking, and then stopped counting. My companion, Rae Anderson, a submarine officer in WWII and Korea, was splattered in blood nearly head to foot and joked that he never looked so bad during the war. His grandson Christopher Anderson, an expert herpetologist, who was then a high school senior, took everything in stride, keeping a keen-eyed vigil for birds with his snake-stick in hand. Nonchalantly, Dennis claimed that wearing sandals allowed him to feel the leeches and remove them at once before they could bite – and his strategy worked!

Despite this irritation, we were in an enchanted forest – a botanical wonderland full of orchids and epiphytes featuring large bird’s nest ferns in nearly every tree. However, we had to walk about five miles through heavily logged forest to get to this area of undisturbed habitat.

Dennis Yong is famed for his ability to mimic bird songs. Usually when he called a bird, we could not tell the difference between his vocalization or the bird’s – and apparently neither could the birds. Because of the repetitious call of the Sumatran Trogon, Dennis saved his vocal chords and used a tape to play its distinctive song – a high-pitched whistling “wiwi…wheeer–lu” repeated every few seconds. We proceeded quite a while without a response. Then we finally heard a Trogon in the distance. The most heart-breaking moment of our expedition occurred when the Trogon’s song was drowned out by the sound of chain saws, operated by local timber cutters. This jarring jolt of reality seemed to crystallize the plight of Trogons in tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia. Dennis felt that this area of forest would be gone in about ten years.

I was eventually able to sketch several Sumatran Trogons at close range in a nearby location. Dennis called them up and Chris immediately spotted them, enabling me to be, most likely, the first artist to correctly paint their true colors which rapidly fade in captive birds. The Sumatran Trogon is restricted to a narrow altitudinal range in montane forest on that island and nowhere else in the world. If recent observations in other parts of its range match my own observations, this Trogon may now have reached threatened status due to the accelerating rate of timber cutting which is descimating its habitat.

The Trogon family including the Quetzals has a distribution that roughly coincides with the world’s rainforests. I made several expeditions to tropical America, Africa and Southeast Asia to draw Trogons from life to illustrate the newly published, limited edition book, Trogons, a Natural History of the Trogonidae by Joseph M. Forshaw. My color plates depict each species in its natural habitat, and Forshaw’s comprehensive text highlights the need to protect these birds by safeguarding the tropical forests so critical to their survival.