WUVULU ISLAND, PNG — Fairy Terns. Purest, brilliant white. Fluttering, racing, swooping, floating, white.

Where you will go, you will not believe.

I grew up on National Geographic specials. There was one image that had captured my imagination and never quite let go. The Fairy Terns. Beautiful, fearless denizens of remote islands who laid single eggs on bare branches.

Fairy Terns. Living white. They danced, no longer in my mind’s eye alone, but in the bright sunshine around me.

How did I come to this place? Never, I had thought, would I see the Fairy Terns.

I didn’t say I will. I said I surrender.

And where you will go, you will not believe.

I saw other birds on the beach, that first morning on Wuvulu Island. The dark birds were noddies, I realized. Then a huge, black, lanky drifter soared overhead. Frigatebird! And a chattering sound behind me turned my eyes to a little black honeyeater with a short and droopy bill.

I wished I had a whole day to bask in the beauty around me, but soon it was time to go to the airstrip. While we waited for the prime minister’s plane, I saw another frigatebird float overhead.

After the prime minister had gone, and after all the excitement of the New Testament dedication had subsided, I sat on the porch as darkness fell. A young man named Chris came up the stairs and said he wanted to “stori” — to talk as friends. He was born on Manus Island but had married into Wuvulu. His wife may have been some relation to our hosts, Rias and Betty, but I was never clear on that point.

He asked me if I liked to snorkel, and I said yes. He promised to take me, and told me some of the things we could see.

I spotted a chicken roosting in a nearby tree. “Kakaruk istap.” I tried, in my inadequate pidgin, to explain that I had worked for our government to list and count birds. I told him that I’d like to see Wuvulu’s birds too. Then, I said, I could go home and tell my friends all about them, and they would say, “We want to go to Wuvulu too.”

He laughed at that and said that if he saw pictures in a book, he could tell me the sorts of birds that live on Wuvulu. More than happy to hear such information, I brought out “Birds of New Guinea.”

We spent the next little while leafing through the illustrations as Chris told me about the birds. The island had no hawks, he said; they all lived on the mainland. Eagles came sometimes, but apparently this is not the right time of year. I was also surprised to hear that one of the mound-builders lives here; Chris described a bird that buried its eggs in sand.

His evaluation of various birds sounded to me like attitudes that had prevailed in our country not so long ago. He looked on larger gruiforms and psittacids with disapproval because they ate crops. And one sort of kingfisher kills young chickens, he said. He asked me if there were any parrots where I came from, and I said no. There had been, but people killed them all. Why? he asked. Did they eat crops?

Well, yes. And women liked to put their feathers in their hair. Terrible reasons to eliminate a species, I thought. But I didn’t know how to say that. Please don’t make the same mistakes here, I thought.

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