Is captive breeding the answer to Indonesia’s songbird crisis?

JAKARTA — On the last weekend in October, thousands of people crowded the field next to Indonesia’s largest sports stadium, Gelora Bung Karno, in the nation’s capital. Visitors streamed through the entrances, many of them carrying large birdcages covered in a cloth to keep the animals inside calm.

The people were congregating to celebrate one of Indonesia’s most prestigious songbird competitions: the President’s Cup. It takes place every two years, and hobby birdkeepers from all corners of the archipelago fly in to participate, their birds in tow.

For the uninitiated, songbird competitions are bewildering to watch. At Gelora Bung Karno, dozens of cages were hung up high on rows of numbered hooks on the inner scaffolding of a temporary roof. On the announcer’s signal, a jury entered and carefully took notes on the birds’ vocalizations and movements. On the sidelines, visitors, bird owners and their crews hooted and cheered, hoping to cajole their favorite bird into outdoing the others with louder trills and fancier postures. The atmosphere was tense, almost rowdy, with more than 8,000 people reportedly in attendance. Smaller events can be found almost daily across the country.

Champion birds can cost a fortune. After his own bird was defeated in a different contest this year, President Joko Widodo offered to buy the winning bird for 600 million rupiah ($41,000). The owner declined. “I didn’t want to let him go,” Muhammad Nur Alamsyah said of his star competitor, a white-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus) named Kitaro. “He has a champion’s mentality, so the price is expensive.”

Alamsyah lives in Brebes, a town on the island of Java, where birdkeeping has a long history. But these days, Indonesia’s songbird craze has given rise to a crisis. As enthusiasm for keeping birds as pets and status symbols has spread across the nation, some species are being driven to the brink of extinction in the wild.

Birds like the straw-headed bulbul (Pycnonotus zeylanicus) have become so rare in Indonesian forests that hunters have started looking for them as far as Malaysia and Thailand. Hobbyists and scientists have sounded the alarm, alerting regulators to what has become an international problem due to cross-border poaching. Birds aren’t just nice to look at or listen to, they’re a vital part of any ecosystem. Losing them can mean losing other species too.

The Indonesian government’s response has been to promote commercial breeding as a solution. Officials say breeding programs have already saved some species from extinction. The hope is that captive-bred birds can satisfy market demand and reduce poaching. There are even ambitions to replenish wild populations through the mass release of birds raised by humans.

Far from achieving a consensus, however, these policies have given rise to a debate within the conservation community about whether captive breeding really is the answer to Indonesia’s songbird crisis. Some warn that raising birds in captivity is not the panacea it may appear to be, and that it may even be counterproductive to conservation goals.

One category of concern lies with the intricacies of breeding itself. While some species mate easily in captivity, others are too sensitive to reproduce much outside their natural habitat. And the hybridization that often occurs under the care of a breeder, where sub-species are crossed, can result in offspring that are ill suited to life in the wild.

But perhaps more alarming is that breeding permits are easily exploited. In October, authorities arrested the owner of a breeding facility in Jember, East Java, confiscating more than 400 rare cockatoos and other birds along with forged documents purporting to show they were raised in captivity. It was the latest evidence of a thriving industry of “wildlife laundering,” where licensed breeders pass off wild-caught animals as captive-bred.

Jess Lee, the director of conservation at Singapore’s Jurong Bird Pak and an initiator of the Asian Songbird Trade Crisis Specialists Group, says that while well-managed breeding programs can prevent the most vulnerable species from going extinct, breeding doesn’t solve the underlying issues. “Basic conservation theory tells you, if you don’t take the threat of poaching away, releasing the birds back won’t change anything,” she tells Mongabay. “You’re just fueling the market.”

Success story?

Indonesian law allows some birds to be bred more freely than others. For those not on the government’s list of protected species, the rules are simple: you need a permit to catch them in the wild, but once you have them, you can breed and sell them without notifying the authorities.

It’s a different story for birds on the list. For these birds, a breeder must declare every individual and have a certificate for it. They can only sell second-generation, captive-born birds, and the certificate must be passed on to the new owner. The number of birds in this category grew immensely earlier this year when the government added hundreds of birds to the list, although several of the most popular ones were later removed after hobbyist groups complained.

Thanks in part to the growing interest in singing competitions, birdkeeping is booming. And as the government searches for ways to boost the economy, especially in the small and medium business segment, promoting commercial breeding makes sense on the surface.

President Widodo himself has described breeders as an engine of growth. “I very much value the bird breeders here,” he said at a recent singing competition in Bogor, West Java. “This is setting the wheels of the people’s economy in motion.”

The enthusiasm extends to regional administrations. Lidia Lily is deputy director of the government conservation agency in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, a hotspot for bird poaching. Her team is trying to increase the number of breeders there by spreading awareness of how they can get licensed.

“So far in West Kalimantan, there are probably only four licensed breeders,” she says. “We try to educate them about the process, we let them know there is no fee to apply for the license.”

In Indonesia, the alternative supply created by breeding isn’t just meant to reduce the incentive for poaching. Breeders are also required to release a tenth of their stock to replenish wild populations. As an example of where that’s worked, proponents often point to the Bali myna (Leucopsar rothschildi), a white bird with black wingtips that came as close as it gets to dying out completely.

In 1990s, there were as few as 13 Bali mynas left in the wild, all of them in a single national park on the island of Bali. The birds fetched such high prices on the black market that a captive-breeding program meant to rejuvenate the wild population was nearly crippled by a pair of robberies, including one by an “armed gang with suspected links to the Indonesian military.” But the program has since managed to release hundreds of the mynas into their native environment, and today the bird is widely raised among small-scale breeders.

“The Bali myna was going to go extinct,” President Widodo said at the competition in Bogor. “Now, because of breeding, there are so many of them.”

But while the Bali myna has multiplied under human care, some question whether its experience can — or, for that matter, should — be extrapolated to other species.

For one thing, most birds don’t adjust to life in captivity as well as mynas do, which can make breeding them in large numbers nearly impossible.

Take the Javan green magpie (Cissa thalassina). The emerald-colored songbird has been hunted to such an extent that conservationists think only around 50 of them remain in the wild.

The Cikananga Wildlife Center, a privately run institution in Java that operates a conservation breeding center, has about 30 Javan green magpies in its program.

Because the bird is known to be very sensitive to environmental changes, breeding it in captivity means emulating its natural environment as closely as possible, with enough vegetation to give it space to hide when caretakers come in, and the right mixture of food, which includes plants, meat and insects, says Bertie Ferns, who manages the songbird breeding program at Cikananga.

Despite the breeders’ best efforts, this year, none of the Javan green magpies have reproduced successfully.

One reason might be that the birds were put into new pairings. When Ferns puts two birds in one enclosure, there’s no guarantee they will like each other. “They’re wild birds, so you could put them together, and they can be quite aggressive towards each other,” he says. Underlying health issues might also be a problem. When new Javan green magpies come in, they’re sometimes not in very good condition, which can show in their color. Their feathers are blue instead of green, and it can take a long time to get them to a stage where they’re fit enough to raise offspring.

The number of possible offspring a conservation breeding program can produce is further limited because one female will only be allowed to lay eggs four times a year. More intensive breeding can affect her health.

“The species that we have are so sensitive that it’s just not possible to breed enough to meet the market requirements,” says Inge Tielen, the conservation manager at Cikananga. “With some species, we’re happy with a few individuals per year being bred. Knowing the market, they’re being sold [in the] thousands at one time.”

To increase the number of birds that reach maturity in captive-breeding facilities, caretakers driven by commercial interests can resort to hatching eggs in an incubator and hand-feeding chicks, rather than providing an environment where the parents raise their young naturally. But this doesn’t make sense in conservation programs if the goal is to produce birds that will thrive in the wild.

Even with more human intervention in the breeding process, the number of birds that can be bred if it’s a sensitive species like the Javan green magpie or straw-headed bulbul is limited.

“By breeding birds in captivity, you will never meet the requirements of the people buying them,” Tielen says. Hobbyist breeding can only work for some birds that are really easy to breed. “For some of the sensitive species, it’s not viable to breed them in the amounts that they are bought.”

Aside from birds that are too used to humans to be able to live independently in the wild, another worry for scientists when it comes to commercial breeding is hybridization — where sub-species are crossed — that affects the genetic integrity of species. Cross-breeding may yield interesting results for hobbyists, but it can also mean the offspring are no longer well-adjusted to their natural environment.

As a result, birds born to breeders may not fit the criteria for successful release. They could pose a threat to the remaining wild population if they introduce diseases, or are genetic hybrids that impact the gene pool of the existing population if they intermix.

“The genetic differences of species and subspecies is subtle but important,” says Katherine Lauck, a conservation biologist who studies Indonesian songbirds. Each breed has traits that make it hyper-adapted to its particular local environment. That’s why the differences exist, she says. Hybrids tend not to survive in the wild.

Even if some species can be bred on a large scale, it’s arguably no substitute for a healthy wild population. The measure of conservation success should be the number of wild rather than caged birds, says Adam Miller, co-founder of Planet Indonesia, an NGO that works on bird conservation in West Kalimantan.

Despite the large numbers of Bali mynas that have been bred and released, its situation in the wild remains precarious. They’re still mostly restricted to West Bali National Park, and many are still poached, a specialist who was involved in several Bali myna release attempts told Mongabay.

“I don’t necessarily think they are conservation success stories when we save a species that’s on the brink of extinction,” Miller tells Mongabay. “It didn’t need to be this way. The situation with the Bali myna didn’t need to get this bad where there’s only 100 left in the wild. The steps could have been done way before that where there’s multiple [wild] populations thriving.” The biggest thing, he says, is preserving the species’ habitat and enforcing the law against poachers.

“But,” he added, “at least the species is around.”

A launderer by any other name

Concerns over the viability of breeding done right are one thing. The most immediate concern about promoting an expansion of breeding, though, is so-called wildlife laundering, a modus operandi that has been called out by wildlife-trade experts many times over, and not just with birds.

It isn’t hard, experts say, for licensed breeders to forge documents to pass off wild-caught animals as captive-bred. And they’re incentivized to do so because breeding, at least for some species, is difficult and expensive. Buying them from poachers and passing them off as legally bred is a lucrative opportunity.

In Indonesia, an obvious weakness of the system is that authorities lack the personnel to ensure licensed breeders follow the rules. “Monitoring is not routine,” said Dwi Adhiasto, a wildlife trade expert at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Another loophole lies in the government’s quota system for captive-bred animals. The government sets per-species quotas for the number of captive-bred animals a breeder can sell. But the quotas for many species are “unrealistically high,” creating room for licensed breeders to bring in wild-caught animals and declare them as captive-bred, the NGO Traffic has found.

Given the issues with breeding, some conservationists prefer to look for other options. Miller says he isn’t aware of a single successful breeder in West Kalimantan, at least in terms of being profitable and operating by the rules, without relying on wild catch to supplement their stock. “The amount of regulation and monitoring that’s necessary to manage breeding here, at the village level, it’s just not ready,” he says. “Once you have a permit, you can basically legally sell illegally trapped and traded birds as much as you want.” Planet Indonesia instead emphasizes protecting birds’ natural habitats and providing economic incentives to steer people away from the trade.

‘We can’t stop the bird keeping hobby’

For their part, hobbyists and small-scale breeders tend to see themselves as guardians of bird species, rather than contributors to their demise.

Hobbyists interviewed by Mongabay said they were well aware that many of the species they prize can now barely be found in the wild. But they downplayed the role of poaching, attributing the drops in population rather to the destruction of the birds’ forest habitats. Indonesia has lost more rainforest since the turn of the century than any country but Brazil, largely as a result of plantation expansion.

Even hobbyists who have had success with breeding will admit that for competitive purposes, wild-caught birds are preferred. Their voices tend to be louder and more aggressive, and their repertoire is wider.

Eris Erwanto, who raises straw-headed bulbuls near Jakarta (the bird is known for its lovely duets) says he estimates only 20 percent of birds entered in contests and declared as captive-bred really are from breeding facilities. Such birds are identified with footrings clipped on at birth, which they later grow into.

“They can fake the footring,” he says. “You can see if it is not fully closed, if it’s clipped on later, not from birth. But we breeders can tell from the behavior of the bird that it is wild-caught.”

On the other hand, law enforcement is getting better at spotting bird launderers.

Authorities who arrested the owner of the breeding facility in East Java recently found evidence of forged documents and fake footrings, Rofiq Ripto Himawan, a law enforcer who was involved in the case, told Mongabay. Experts were able to attest that many of the birds found at the facility were likely collected from the wild. Big busts like this typically involve high-profile birds like cockatoos; there has yet to be a case where a fraudulent breeder of the smaller, less widely recognized songbirds is exposed, Rofiq says.

More broadly, there’s a lack of data on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to captive breeding.

“We’re still in a trial-and-error-phase,” Lee of the Jurong Bird Park says. She thinks the pressure on wild populations will only ease when there’s a change in mindset, and the huge demand for songbirds drops. Like Tielen, she thinks it’s unlikely that breeding can match market demand, but she considers conservation breeding, if done right, one measure to save the most vulnerable creatures from extinction.

With people as prominent as the president supporting the hobby and competitions booming, the enthusiasm for birdkeeping doesn’t seem like it will wane anytime soon.

“For some species, like the white-rumped shama, breeding can provide a solution,” says Yokyok Hadiprakarsa, director of the Indonesian Ornithologists Union. The white-rumped shama, a popular competition bird, is considered easier to breed in captivity than the straw-headed bulbul or Javan green magpie. But Yoyok also warns that the availability of birds from captive breeding won’t automatically stop poaching. “Psychologically, people still believe the wild-caught birds are better.”

“We can’t stop birdkeeping as hobby,” he concludes. “We can try to regulate how it’s done. We have to try.”

***

Nadine Freischlad is a Jakarta-based journalist. Follow her on Twitter: @texastee 

Banner image: The white-rumped shama is a popular songbird in Indonesia. Image by Jason Thompson/Flickr.

FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.