Somewhere in Indonesia right now, a songbird is being stuffed into a plastic bottle. In Cyprus, one is stuck to a glue-covered stick, hanging upside down. In Trinidad, one is being trapped for a singing competition that will pay its owner the equivalent of years’ salary. This is happening across at least 19 countries, and most people have no idea.
The illegal songbird trade doesn’t get the headlines that ivory or rhino horn does, but conservationists say it deserves to. On the island of Java alone, it’s now thought there are more songbirds in cages than in forests.
Singing competitions—which emerged in Southeast Asia in the 1970s and spread globally—have become a primary engine of demand, offering prize money, motorcycles, even cars to owners of the best singers. Wild-caught birds are considered superior performers, which means poachers keep emptying forests to supply them. “They’re so popular and financially beneficial that they’re accelerating the poaching of birds to the point where now the forests are falling silent,” acoustic biologist Benjamin Mirin, who has studied the trade since 2018, told Live Science.
Indonesia sits at the center of the crisis. An estimated 66 to 84 million caged birds are kept on the island, with one in three households owning birds. Indonesian law bans the capture and trade of more than 500 species—but weak enforcement and widespread corruption mean the ban functions more as a suggestion. The Javan pied starling is already gone from the wild. The Bali myna, with its white plumage and electric-blue eye ring, was down to six wild individuals in the early 2000s. Rarity drives up price, which drives up demand, which drives down populations further.
The Songbirds of Southeast Asia Aren’t the Only Ones at Risk
The crisis, sadly, extends well beyond Southeast Asia. More than 25 million songbirds are shot, trapped, and collected every year across 23 Mediterranean countries, including Italy, France, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. In the Caribbean and South America, species like the chestnut-bellied seed finch are being trapped into population collapse. Illegal trade operations have been uncovered in Florida, New York, and California, where smugglers transported songbirds for sale to expatriate communities. “Our blue jays are showing up in European markets. Our cardinals are showing up in European markets,” Mike Kreger of the Columbus Zoo told the American Zoo Association. “The export of these birds is illegal.”
In West Kalimantan, Indonesia, a sanctuary called Wak Gatak is doing what it can. Since opening in 2022, it has rehabilitated nearly 3,000 birds from 45 species—releasing 348 back into the wild. It’s the only facility of its kind in the country. Up to 70 to 80% of birds arriving at the center die within the first two weeks because their condition is so poor, according to head veterinarian Happy Ferdiansyah.
Conservation biologist Alexander Lees has described what happens to ecosystems when songbirds disappear en masse, pointing to Guam, which lost nearly all its songbirds after an invasive snake was introduced post-WWII. The forests there became, in his words, “a nightmarish alternative state as a spider-dominated ecosystem.” The phrase he used for it was “pretty catastrophic.” For what’s unfolding globally right now, that description isn’t far off.
The post The Bird Singing Competitions Pushing Wild Songbirds Toward Extinction appeared first on VICE.
