The expedition team — which included local Papua New Guineans working with Papua New Guinea National Museum, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and American Bird Conservancy — arrived on Fergusson in early September 2022. They spent a month traveling around the island, interviewing local communities to identify locations to set up camera traps in hopes of finding the pheasant-pigeon. The steep, mountainous terrain on Fergusson Island made searching for the bird extremely challenging.

“It wasn't until we reached villages on the western slope of Mt. Kilkerran that we started meeting hunters who had seen and heard the pheasant-pigeon,” said Jason Gregg, conservation biologist and a co-leader of the expedition team. “We became more confident about the local name of the bird, which is ‘Auwo,' and felt like we were getting closer to the core habitat of where the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon lives.”