BOROKO, PNG — The first thing I noticed, as I drifted awake this first morning in another world, was the paucity of birdsong. Traffic roared outside, and the ceiling fan whooshed and squealed continually.

But aside from distant snatches of Willie-wagtail song, the avian world was silent.

I spent some time just looking out the windows, but I saw a very few birds: House Sparrows, two woodswallows, and one Willie-wagtail.

Shortly after eight, a strange screeching started up outside my window. I paid little attention at first because I didn’t think the sounds were actually coming from birds. The noise didn’t stop, so I went to the window to check it out.

Two birds flew through the branches, and I knew almost immediately that they weren’t parrots, which had been my guess based on the raucous sounds. I got my binoculars on one of the birds: a largish passerine with a stout black bill and pale cinnamon underparts. Proportionally, it had a longer neck and a smaller head than most songbirds do, and its big black eye was set in a streaked, brownish face. The birds’ upperparts were drab and streaked, as were their upper breasts.

After I’d watched them moving around a bit, they went out of sight, but the squawking didn’t stop. I hurried outside to watch them some more, and there I could see that there were four or more in the tree. They didn’t stay still for long, and I never could make out what they were actually doing. I didn’t see them eating anything, and they didn’t appear to interact much with each other.

I knew they weren’t honeyeaters, and the only thing I could think of was bowerbirds. But I had never imagined bowerbirds 1. in the treetops or 2. in a city. In a few more minutes, the birds had moved out of sight, and I went inside to get breakfast.

Breakfast done, I returned to my room to research. I found the species easily enough: Fawn-breasted Bowerbird. Cool!

As the morning went on, I watched two Willie-wagtails swooping around a bougainvillea, their black-and-white plumage contrasting sharply with the bright magenta blooms.

A woodswallow landed on a powerline, its bill clamped firmly on a large sphinx moth. The moth seemed to be half the bird’s size, and I wondered what the bird was going to do with the creature, now that it was caught. The process wasn’t quick, but eventually, the bird managed to remove all four wings, getting its face covered with dusty scales as it worked.

Once it got down to the cigar-shaped body, the situation looked more hopeful, but the body was still too large to be swallowed. The bird was not equipped to hold the moth between its feet and tear off pieces, so it shook the body around and knocked against the arm of a telephone pole. It sat for long moments not doing anything, just looking around with the corpse still held firmly in its blue-gray bill.

Eventually, after it had torn off and swallowed a few smaller pieces, it maneuvered what was left of the abdomen and started gulping. It took a little while, but finally the whole thing was down, and the bird sat still, looking around and bobbing its tail in satisfaction.

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