Inside the Illegal Songbird Trade in Indonesia

There are few birds more colorful or with a more beautiful song than the Javan green magpie. Unfortunately, this beauty has led the birds to be captured and sold illegally into the songbird trade in Indonesia for singing competitions or as pets. Conservationists from the Chester Zoo went undercover to document the scope of the issues and ultimately staged a rescue. Today, these birds are bred at the zoo for release in the wild to boost their at-risk populations.
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The ones in Jakarta, particularly the one called Pramuka bird market, which is actually the biggest wildlife market on the planet, is a really depressing place to visit actually as someone who's a bird lover.

The songbird black market is immense. It's across every border. It's across the globe.

Unless we can control and stop the illegal wildlife trade with these songbirds, the inevitable result is going to be the extinction of multiple species across Southeast Asia.... These forests really are falling silent.

#birds #aviation #illegalwildlife trade #wildlife #wildcrime #seeker #nature #conservation

Read More:

Sing For Songbirds | Chester Zoo
“All over Indonesia the forests are falling silent because the songbirds that once lived there are threatened by extinction. We’re facing a crisis because these beautiful, remarkable and rare birds are being captured and trapped by local people to be used either in singing competitions or kept in cages as a status symbol.”
https://www.chesterzoo.org/news/sing-for-songbirds/

Songbirds are disappearing from the wild – here's why
“There are more songbirds in captivity than in the wild on the Indonesian island of Java, research by Manchester Metropolitan University and Chester Zoo has found. One-third of the island’s population keep birds as ornamental pets or, in the songbird’s case, as contestants in birdsong competitions for cash prizes.”
https://geographical.co.uk/nature/wildlife/item/3403-songbirds-java

Indonesian songbird crisis
“The trade in songbirds is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars to the Indonesian economy, so it is no surprise that it is a key regional source of both supply and demand for songbirds, with hundreds of markets running across the archipelago, selling more than 200 different species – the majority of which are native to Indonesia.”
https://theecologist.org/2019/oct/02/indonesian-songbird-crisis
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Across the globe, elephants are poached for their tusks, pangolins for their scales, and totoaba fish for their bladders. Tackling the fourth largest crime industry in the world isn’t easy, but biologists, roboticists, detectives and even NASA scientists are getting creative in the hopes of making a difference. In this Seeker series, we’ll investigate true stories of wildlife crime and meet the people who are working to protect the world’s most endangered and persecuted animals.

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