Comparisons of songbirds on sale across online and physical markets in Indonesia

Abstract

Unsustainable wildlife trade is a leading threat to biodiversity, not least in Southeast Asia where serious overexploitation of songbirds has precipitated the ‘Asian Songbird Crisis’. While the nature of bird trade in physical markets is fairly well studied, the growing online trade in birds is far less understood, in terms of diversity and traits of birds on offer. Here, online trade, monitored across twelve broad spectrum Indonesian bird-selling Facebook groups over a period of six months in 2022, is compared to published data from physical markets, and from a machine learning web-scrape. Nearly 2,000 individuals of 190 Indonesian species were recorded from Facebook, with 9.5% of species being categorised as Threatened (IUCN 2022), 15.8% protected under Indonesian law, and 17.4% regarded as priority taxa according to the Asian Songbird Trade Specialist Group. These represent similar proportions of species to those from physical market surveys, although physical markets had more individuals of protected species than did Facebook groups. Bird family composition did not correlate between online and physical platforms, with the former dominated by Muscicapidae and the latter by Estrildidae. Controlling for trade volume, online groups had higher species richness than physical markets, although the difference was not significant. Bird ‘communities’ on offer in the individual Facebook groups were both similar to each other, and distinct from those in physical markets, although there was a geographical signature especially in the latter. Results highlight the importance of monitoring online trade as, while there are substantial differences in types of birds sold, it contains a similarly high number of species of conservation concern to physical markets.