A Silent Morning: The Songbird Trade in Kalimantan, Indonesia

Abstract

The wild bird trade is a major driver of species loss in Indonesia. However, studies of the Indonesian bird trade have focused on the island of Java, providing little information on the bird trade in other regions, such as Kalimantan. We conducted the first-ever market surveys in rural West Kalimantan from July 2015 to August 2016 and in the capital city of each of the five provinces of Kalimantan from August 2016 to February 2017. At each market, we recorded the number of individuals of each species, the price per individual for each species, and the source of each individual. In addition, we asked 32 bird traders and owners from Kalimantan to fill out a questionnaire addressing their perceptions of changes in price and availability of commercial species over time. Across our survey, we located 201 shops and 25,298 individuals for sale from 153 identified species. We conclude that our market surveys document only part of the trade and affirm that the bird trade is of considerable size in Kalimantan. We recommend that conservationists focus on conserving Kalimantan's remaining forest and reducing demand through education and behavior change programs. We echo the calls of other conservationists for Indonesia to update the Conservation Act (No. 5) of 1990 to include current species of concern and for law enforcement efforts to stop both local trade and cross-island trade between Kalimantan and Java. Our study underlines the threat to the persistence of many Indonesian avian species.

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“…The integrated and cross-scale nature of CBC offers lessons and themes that could potentially strengthen conservation as a field and be applied to this issue. Rentschlar et al (2018) in the journal of Tropical Conservation Science highlighted the severity of the Indonesian caged bird trade across all five provinces on Indonesian-Borneo documenting over 25,000 individuals form 200 species. Marshall et al (2020) conducted household surveys and estimated that between 66-83 million caged-birds were kept in captivity on the island of Java alone.…”

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“…Bird species are far more widely represented in trade than mammals, and a disproportionate number of avian taxa are threatened by overexploitation (Alves, Lima, & Araújo, 2013; Bush, Baker, & Macdonald, 2014). This is particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia (Coleman et al., 2019; Harris et al, 2017), where intense demand has precipitated an ‘Asian Songbird Crisis’ (Lee, Chng, & Eaton, 2016; Rentschlar et al., 2018; Sykes, 2017). Halting the extraction of birds from the wild, or at least reducing it to sustainable levels, is thus a global conservation priority (Bezerra, Araújo, & Alves, 2019; Marshall et al., 2020a; Symes, Edwards, Miettinen, Rheindt, & Carrasco, 2018) alongside addressing the problem of habitat loss, which in Asia threatens more bird species than anywhere except Amazonia (BirdLife International, 2020).…”

“…The trapping and trading of birds globally is driven principally by demand for pets, but also by the need for nutritional and medicinal resources, symbolic or cultural practices and gambling‐related contests (Bezerra et al., 2019; de Oliveira, de Faria Lopes, & Alves, 2018; Jepson, 2010; Harris et al., 2017; Souto et al, 2017). Domestic consumption of birds as pets in two large biodiverse countries, Brazil and Indonesia, may actually be larger than the total international market (Alves et al., 2013; Jepson & Ladle, 2005; Rentschlar et al., 2018). Regulating domestic trade to prevent significant impacts on wild bird populations is, however, problematic, as the size and variety of the networks involved can make enforcement logistically and politically difficult (Alves et al., 2013; Bezerra et al., 2019).…”

“…Bird species are far more widely represented in trade than mammals, and a disproportionate number of avian taxa are threatened by overexploitation (Alves, Lima, & Araújo, 2013;Bush, Baker, & Macdonald, 2014). This is particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia (Coleman et al, 2019;Harris et al, 2017), where intense demand has precipitated an 'Asian Songbird Crisis' (Lee, Chng, & Eaton, 2016;Rentschlar et al, 2018;Sykes, 2017).…”

“…Harvest quotas have, however, only been set for a few species, thereby rendering the capture or trade of any other species illegal (Chng et al., 2015). Nevertheless, the trade and ownership of wild‐caught birds is ubiquitous across Indonesia (Chng et al., 2018; Marshall et al., 2020a) and bird traders are often confused about or unaware of the law (Rentschlar et al., 2018) making enforcement both difficult and unpopular (Janssen & Chng, 2018; Miller et al., 2019).…”