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- A web-trawling tool developed by researchers in Indonesia has identified more than a quarter of a million songbirds in online listings from a single e-commerce site between April 2020 and September 2021.
- More than 6% of these were species listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List, including the Javan pied starling (Gracupica jalla) and the straw-headed bulbul (Pycnonotus zeylanicus), both critically endangered.
- In a newly published paper, the researchers say the online bird trade is highly successful thanks to well-developed e-commerce infrastructure such as internet and shipping services.
- The researchers have proposed the adoption of their tool by Indonesian authorities to monitor the online bird trade, given the absence of any other platform to crack down on trafficking.
JAKARTA — Researchers in Indonesia have harnessed the power of big data to monitor the flourishing online trade in songbirds, proposing it as a critical conservation tool in the absence of any other platform to crack down on trafficking.
The researchers, from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), developed their “Support Vector Machine,” or SVM, to collect all publicly available listings of songbird advertisements between April 2020 and September 2021 from an online marketplace in Indonesia. This web-scraping tool found 326,201 records of relevant ads, accounting for 284,118 songbirds, the researchers wrote in a paper published Sept. 5 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation.
“Looking at our result, the trade using online platforms has a high success rate,” lead author Beni Okarda told Mongabay in an email.
The keeping of songbirds is a popular pastime in Indonesia, especially among the Javanese, who see it as signifying status and promoting peace of mind. The activity has expanded beyond Java, thanks largely to the government’s transmigration program that relocated residents of the densely populated island to other parts of the country, allowing birdkeeping to take root in those regions.
Previous studies on the bird trade have highlighted urban markets in Java and Sumatra. A 2005 report estimated that an average of 614,180 native songbirds were trapped and traded annually throughout the two islands.
Songbirds are also prized for use in contests, which have spawned thriving networks of clubs, online forums and blogs. President Joko Widodo, himself a noted songbird collector and fan, said in March 2018 that birdkeeping contributed an estimated 1.7 trillion rupiah ($114 million) to the economy.
Okarda said the species they identified in the online listings largely mirrored the composition of songbirds kept by households as identified in a 2020 study. Okarda’s team also found that more than 6% of the ads, or just over 18,000, listed threatened species, such as the Javan pied starling (Gracupica jalla) and the straw-headed bulbul (Pycnonotus zeylanicus), both considered critically endangered.
Another pattern that the study highlighted was that most of the sellers were not traders by profession, meaning they weren’t buying and selling the birds for commercial purposes, but as hobbyists. Most were based in Java, with most transactions occurring within the same city or island.
“I believe the [e-commerce] infrastructure … is one of the main factors of successful online trading activities,” study co-author Sonya Dyah Kusumadewi told Mongabay in the email, referring to widely accessible internet and a plethora of shipping services, including same-day delivery.