Correctly discussing the true number of endemic birds found in a country is challenging. Field guides usually rely on outdated taxonomy, while the internet is full of misleading estimates which are now fuelling AI to provide the same incorrect numbers. A quick search for the question posed in this article's title provides me with answers ranging from 195 to 356 to 500+. Our guests often want to know exactly how many species are endemic or near endemic to the regions we visit, and aside from sitting down with the full list and doing a manual count there often no way to know for places with huge species list. Nowhere is this more true than the island of New Guinea, with added confusion coming from the actual definitions of New Guinea, Papua, West Papua, Papua New Guinea, and which adjacent archipelagos should be included. So let's dive in and find the right answer.

Defining Endemics and Near Endemics

While building Ornis Birding itineraries, we get help from a custom web tool (Global Birding Targets) which pulls eBird data and accurately calculates the Endemics, Near Endemics, and Specialties of a given country. While the definitions of Near Endemic and Specialty are a little vague, an Endemic is precisely defined: every species which has not a single accepted eBird record in any other country. The tool gives me some fast and accurate answers:

Papua New Guinea:

• 124 Endemic

• 390 Near Endemic

• 24 Specialty

Indonesia:

• 513 Endemic

• 408 Near Endemic

• 70 Specialty

These numbers by themselves are not hugely useful. Some birders will immediately notice that the number of endemic birds for Indonesia seems low. This is because there are 50+ which are shared with Timor-Leste, 20+ which are shared with Malaysia/Brunei on Borneo, and a few more which have been recorded on eBird as regular vagrants or introduced species elsewhere. Those birds fall under Near Endemic. Additionally, numbers given are for the country of Indonesia, rather than the Indonesian Archipelago (the latter excluding West Papua but including the entire islands of Borneo and Timor). Others have inexhaustibly calculated endemics of the Indonesian Archipelago multiple times, the real number currently hovering around 620 species depending on your taxonomy

Calculating how many Endemics are found on the island of New Guinea

The island of New Guinea has received less attention on this front. Is made up of two parts: the eastern country of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the Indonesian-administered West Papua. From here on, I will refer to these two halves as Papua New Guinea and West Papua. I am including the Aru Islands, Biak Archipelago, and Raja Ampat Archipelago as part of West Papua, these regions rarely included as part of the Indonesian Archipelago in ornithological works.

Unlike the Indonesian Archipelago, taxonomy across New Guinea is much more solidly defined due to the majority of species being contiguous across the main island. Aside from those found on the outlying archipelagos and a few isolated mountain ranges, many of New Guinea's endemic species are widespread across both halves with regular genetic mixing between subpopulations. Having downloaded the CSV files for both Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, I have grouped the columns into Endemic and Near Endemic to quickly give me the below numbers:

124 (Papua New Guinea Endemics)

66 (West Papua Endemics, counted from within the 513 Indonesian Endemics)

Now all that is left is to do a quick grouping of the Near Endemics. From the Indonesia CSV file I immediately filter and remove all species found in countries other the Papua New Guinea, after which a quick manual check takes out another 10 species which are endemic to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia but also range further west into the Moluccas, thus not counting as endemic to New Guinea (eg: Bare-eyed Rail and Yellow-capped Pygmy Parrot). This gives:

237 (Additional Endemics shared between Papua New Guinea x West Papua)

There is one last complication. Adding these three numbers together gives us 427 birds, but that includes a number of species found on Bougainville. This island is administered by Papua New Guinea, but is biogeographically part of the Solomon Islands and best excluded from the tally. Thanks to this invisible natural border there are actually no species on our remaining list of New Guinea endemics which reach Bougainville from the west, so we simply subtract the 9 single-island endemics to give our final result:

New Guinea holds 416 endemic bird species.

This definition follows IOC-2024 taxonomy and rigorously includes birds which have been recorded only from the main island or the following off-lying island groups:

• Admiralty Islands

• Aru Islands

• Biak Archipelago

• Bismarck Archipelago

• D'Entrecasteaux Archipelago

• Louisiade Archipelago

• Raja Ampat Archipelago

We intend to update this page once AviList-2026 is incorporated into our endemics tool, and will add a full list of every species.