It’s April. Sunday. The minibus terminal in Sukubumi, Indonesia, looks tired from the street. But hang back, round the corner, where the air is thick with smoke and cheap energy. Hundreds of men are waiting. A motorbike is on the line.
They’re here for the songbirds.
First, the minor leagues. Tiny garden sunbirds. Grey-cheeked bulbuls. Ten minutes of singing, applause, moving on. Then, the main event. The white-rumped sham. The crowd goes quiet. You can hear a pin drop, which is wild given how loud everyone was before. The judges scribble on clipboards. They listen for the tune. The volume. The style.
Two birds remain. “Baby White” wins. Cheers erupt.
Harry Gunawan is 78. He’s a businessman. He owns 39 shamas. This one is the prize winner. “It relieves stress,” he says, eyeing the motorbike prize. “And maybe I make some money.”
Harry isn’t just a hobbyist. He’s part of a massive problem.
On Java, home to 56 percent of the country, one in three households keeps birds. Estimates say there are between 66 and 84 million caged songbirds in that single island. Just one. Think about the logistics. That is millions of crates. Millions of drainpipes. Millions of plastic bottles.
They aren’t born in cages. Mostly, they are stolen from forests. Trappers catch them, jam them into tight spaces, and ship them to Jakarta or Surabaya. The mortality rate is brutal. Thirty percent die? Eighty percent? Who knows exactly. But the ones who make it stay in bars forever.
Experts call it “the Asian songbird crisis.” And they aren’t being dramatic.
Agung Nur Haq runs the Wak Gatak rescue center. He says the “silent forest” is happening now. Really happening. Not a metaphor.
Alexander Lees, a biologist from the UK, worries about “empty forest syndrome.” You look at a forest. It’s green. Lush. Full of life visually. But listen? Nothing. The animals are gone. Just trees. Empty.
The Trade That Doesn’t Stop
It’s not just Indonesia. Vietnam. Thailand. Malaysia. The illegal trade is booming across Southeast Asia. But Indonesia is the big league for this nightmare.
Chris Shepherd, an expert on wildlife trade, calls it “terrifying.” He’s right. Indonesia has 1,800 species of birds. More than double the USA. One in five of them ends up in a pet market. That includes the endangered black-winged mynas and Javan green magpies. Fewer than 100 of those magpies remain in the wild.
Some 90 million people in Indonesia keep birds. Up to 187 million individual creatures behind bars. Lees wrote somewhere that there might be more caged birds in the country than wild ones. Imagine that. The wild is the minority now.
Why? Tradition. Javanese culture says a successful man needs five things. A wife. A house. A vehicle. A dagger. A bird.
The bird is the soft touch. The leisure. It’s status. But it’s also the song.
Since the 1970s, singing competitions have fueled the demand. Weekly events. Monthly tournaments. A thousand birds in a hall. The prizes aren’t just bragging rights. They are goats. Motorcycles. Cars. Ten years’ salary, sometimes.
Benjamin Mirin, who studies the sound of this crisis, says the money changes everything. It accelerates the poaching. The forests go quiet because everyone is too busy getting rich.
Here is the catch: people think wild-caught birds sing better. Captive-bred ones just don’t compare. So the demand stays on the wild populations.
The law forbids catching 500 species. The law exists. The enforcement does not. Corruption. Poor resources. No money for guards.
The result? The Javan pied starling is locally extinct. Gone.
What happens when you wipe out songbirds?
Ecological collapse. Birds pollinate. They move seeds. They eat bugs. Guam offers the preview. An invasive snake ate almost every songbird there. The forests didn’t disappear. They just became a nightmare. A spider-dominated hell. No birds. Just bugs everywhere.
Indonesia isn’t Guam. It’s bigger. Less isolated. Lees says our starting conditions aren’t as bad. Yet. If the populations don’t bounce back, we might get the same spider soup downstream.
Sanctuary
There’s no place for seized birds. Government agencies find them but don’t want to keep them. So Planet Indonesia built Wak Gatak. A sanctuary near Pontianak.
It looks nothing like a prison. Quiet. Green. Coconut trees swaying. Dragonflies in the air. Modest buildings. Light. Space.
Happy Ferdiansyah is the head vet here. The birds arrive in shock. Malnourished. Featherless. Some have chewed their beaks on cage bars. Others broke legs fighting.
“70 to 80% die in the first two weeks,” Happy says. Their bodies are already shutting down.
He doesn’t touch them at first. Too stressful. He watches. The obviously sick ones go to the clinic. The rest go to quarantine cages. Small ones, yes, but bigger than what they had. Vitamins. Fruit. Insects. Sugar syrup.
Two weeks is the danger zone. Diseases hide. Avian flu. Newcastle disease. They test blood and poop. If the birds clear, they move to the rehab aviaries. Bathroom-sized rooms with plants and sky.
Food enrichment. Hiding spots. They teach them to fly again. To use the branches.
Not everyone goes back.
Take the common hill myna. Smart. Chatty. Glossy black with orange bills. Four are at Wak Gatak right now. They’ve been there a year. They wolf-whistle. They laugh. One said “As-salamu alaykum” (Peace be upon you). Another spoke Indonesian slang.
They love people now. That’s bad for wild birds. They might confuse the wild flocks. Or teach them city sounds. So they stay. Forever residents.
For the rest, they need a release site. Good forest. No snakes. No civets. Local people who care about nature helps. Survival goes up 10 percent when communities are involved.
In April, the team drove seven hours north. They took 130 birds. A soft release. A large cage in the woods. Let them get used to the air. Four days. Ten days. Then they open the door.
The birds leave when ready.
The team stays for two weeks. Watching. Making sure no one gets eaten. It is hot work. Sweaty work. Hard.
Happy has helped 348 birds return. That April trip was the biggest batch yet. Crimson sunbirds. Green leafbirds. Endangered species going home.
Last December, 705 birds seized from a port ship died within hours. Only 36 survived. 22 were released.
Nearly 3,000 since 2022. That proves a center works. But against the millions traded? It is a drop in an ocean. A bucket with a hole in it.
Changing the Mind
Experts agree. Stop the demand. Not the poachers alone, though that matters. Change the culture.
“We have to shift attitudes,” says Lees.
Wak Gatak is trying. Billboards in the city saying: don’t compete. Don’t buy. Soon, workshops in towns near forests. They want to talk to people before they trap.
It’s uphill. The hobbyists are powerful. In 2018 they lobbied successfully to remove protections from five bird species.
Even politicians play along. In 2016, then-president Joko Widodo hosted the President’s Cup. He entered his own shama. You can’t fight the boss.
But individual change is possible.
Happy Ferdiansyah used to keep birds. Four of them. As a kid. They sounded nice. He thought he was helping them be happy. Then he studied vet med. He saw the damage. He realized the error. He let them go.
He sets them free now. Day by day. Cage by cage.
The forests are still there. Green. Lush. But are they listening? Or just waiting to become spiders?
No neat answer. Just the hum of a motorbike and the silence waiting outside. 🐦🚫
