The songbird trade in Indonesia is a major driver of avian species loss. Songbird traders represent the link between trappers and consumers for this lucrative industry, though details on the dynamics of this relationship remain understudied. To understand why songbird shop owners entered the trade, if businesses were lucrative, and assess owner receptiveness to adopting alternative businesses, we investigated socioeconomic characteristics of 95 songbird shop owners via an interview-style survey across 13 regencies in West Kalimantan. Responses from shop owners showed a widespread lack of legal permitting for businesses and the sale of bird species. Indeed, the majority of respondents (63%) did not have the mandatory business permits, which suggests that nonwildlife regulatory laws could be leveraged to reduce the volume of the illegal songbird trade in West Kalimantan. Nearly half of all respondents (40%) noted that bird trading was not their sole income source, nor was it particularly lucrative. More than half (55%) of all bird traders interviewed expressed interest in switching to alternative businesses if given the resources and opportunity to do so. This study offers novel insights into motives of engaging in songbird trade in West Kalimantan. This study also supports the possibility of addressing the songbird trade via a combination of law enforcement and alternative business programs.

Wildlife managers and researchers need to understand the status of the wildlife populations they are trying to conserve. Though various methods have been developed to monitor wildlife in their natural habitats, the complexity and accessibility of most techniques often limit their usability. Such techniques often take significant resources and time to deliver results, and methodological noncompliance may lower the reliability of results. Given this need to study wildlife populations reliably, quickly and within financial and human resource constraints faced by wildlife managers, we assessed the reliability and effort required to carry the pooling local expert opinion (PLEO) method as articulated by Hoeven et al. (2004). We did this by comparing density estimates of several wildlife species derived by following the PLEO method with those estimated using a conventional method along with results from the literature on wildlife monitoring studies from Bornean rainforests. Our analysis shows that the PLEO methodology provides an effective and complementary tool to estimate wildlife densities in tropical rainforests. We suggest that by incorporating the PLEO methodology into regular monitoring activity, conservation NGOs can create a platform that allows for participatory wildlife monitoring and create the platform to involve local communities in biodiversity conservation.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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