The third episode in the New Guinea series of Mongabay Explores covers the island’s unique birds-of-paradise, and their symbolism as ambassadors for both the island’s beautiful landscape, and also the culture of the people who live there: Listen here: The provinces of Papua and West Papua contain roughly half of Indonesia’s remaining tropical forests. Comprised of many remote villages separated by an extreme topography, the land is mostly undeveloped, which has attracted the attention of extractive industries as well as infrastructure development from the central Indonesian government. Yet muc…