UKARUMPA, PNG — Walking home this morning, I was nearly impaled by swiftlets. It was a small flock, hunting low over the road and lawns. Sometimes they flew straight for me, approaching so closely that I flinched.

But I guess they knew what they were doing. After all, they — not I — are the ones who can echolocate their way through total darkness.

I noticed their pale bellies again, and again, I wondered about them. I’ve corresponded with a man who’s studied swiftlets for decades, and he assures me New Guinea’s four similar species cannot be identified in the field. He even suggested that Uniform and Mountain swiftlets could be an altitudinal cline instead of separate species.

My thoughts kept returning to a conversation from the day before. I’d been in the sauna with Alan, a brilliant linguist who works with the Kovai people on Umboi Island. I think Alan can speak about seven languages — maybe more.

Anyway, he is working on a Kovai dictionary, and the people have given him names of many different birds. But all the dictionary says is “bird, kind of” — over and over again.

So if I can make it to Umboi, Alan wants to send me into the rainforest with a couple of Kovai men, to see if we can put some Latin names beside all those Kovai words.

Reaching Umboi, though, isn’t quite as easy as driving across town. I hope I can go, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

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