As a conservation scientist working in the tropics, I must surely live in a bird-watchers’ paradise.
In Indonesia, where I work for The Nature Conservancy, over 1,640 bird species have been recorded, or nearly twice the number of wild bird species in the United States. You would think birds are everywhere. Surely my garden should reveal one colorful one after another.
Strangely, nothing could be further from the truth.
I have lived in three different towns in Indonesia for over 11 years. We always had big gardens with plenty of vegetation and some nice tall trees. But the total number of species seen in those gardens were a paltry 25 species in six years in a town on the island of Java, and 17 species in five years on Borneo. This included the occasional bird of prey flying overhead.
For comparison, I also spent a few years in Australia, which has about 860 bird species. In one year in Cairns, in the tropical north, I counted 38 garden species. In the three years I spent in Canberra, 65 bird species came for a visit.
Even in U.S. or European towns, I tend to see a lot more bird species than I ever do in the towns of Indonesia. Why is that?
I don’t think anyone has really studied this. And the good thing about unstudied things is that you can freely speculate.
What does play a role is that a lot of birds here get shot by kids or adults playing with air rifles or catapults. It is quite common to see men or boys walking through town in search of some avian prey, or the occasional squirrel. But I don’t think this explains the full picture.
I suspect that many birds of the tropics which evolved in closed forest conditions simply can’t survive in town and city environments. Towns may not offer the right food or nesting opportunities. And without food and reproduction, a species doesn’t stand much of a chance. If that’s true, Indonesian birds would stand to lose a lot more from deforestation than birds in others parts of the world.
I’d better get back to work and put some more effort into saving the remaining rainforests of Indonesia.
(Image: Gang-gang cockatoo in Canberra, Australia. Credit: Erik Meijaard.)
Tags: Australia, Birds, Erik Meijaard, Indonesia
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Erik,
Very interesting observations. Can you comment on the relative hunting pressure you’ve noted at these different locations? I’d also be interested in hearing more about the purposes behind this activity. Are air rifles in particular the main weapon used in your experience? Is the take for food, trade, personal use, sport, or? Is there a need for more education, regulations and/or enforcement in Indonesia? I suspect the answer is yes to all, but how to implement?
I hope to visit, at some point, a friend and family met via an exchange student program several years ago.
Thanks, Dale
My cousin just got back from Viet Nam where she noticed much the same thing. When she asked a (native) guide, he told her that the people have had to eat them.
Interesting. I know indeed that there is a general love for shooting little birds and mammals in SE Asia, either for sport or food. I can see that hunting does likely play a role, because in places like some of the resort towns on Bali, where because of large numbers of tourists it is not really possible to go around shooting birds, the species richness and numbers of birds are remarkably high. (But at the same time, there is a big drive to get rid off snakes in those resorts…).
Hi Dale,
I haven’t really studied this, but it would certainly be worth addressing in more detail. Not easy to quantify hunting pressure though. Here in western Indonesia, the purposes of shootings birds and mammals are mostly for sport. Little kids start with catapults, and then man take over with air rifles. Bird keeping is very popular in Indonesia, and there is therefore a general culture of bird collecting. To address this would require long-term programs. I am not sure whether it requires specific programs on bird shooting, or whether one could wait and let the general trend for increasing environmental awareness drive such a culture change.
Hello Erik,
I’m very grateful to read this blog and your writing, because I need some idea to make my thesis synopsis to apply for the master course. I’still think about it what i must should write specially about the wildlife conservation, birds and the environment. Before this, I had my research scholar about the diversity of birds at some forest type areas in Riau Sumatra, to see the birds diversity differences. So Erik, what do you think about this topic, is it still a good idea at Indonesia to talk about the diversity of birds or maybe about the new species and the endangered species?
Why don’t you take some cool initiative and be the first or one of the first to address the question of why birds faunas in Indonesian or Sumatran towns are so impoverished. Find a way to quantify hunting pressure (maybe through interviews or observations). Do house-to-house interviews on cage bird keeping. And do some ecological studies on birds that do survive in towns (see my blog on the Church Bird of Borneo). That will make a really nice master thesis with some very innovative and useful conservation science.
I suspect that this is a habitat issue. When I lived in Pontianak, Kalbar, there were few birds in the city, but plenty in a small peri-urban forest. I did not see many people bird hunting in Pontianak. Most of the birds you see in Indon & Mal towns are adapted to open country (e.g. kingfishers), suggesting that forest birds just don’t find the right habitat. Also, cats are very abundant in many Indon & Mal towns. Cats play a major role in reducing populations & diversity of British birds.
Hi Tom,
Both good points, and I have indeed seem similar effects in small patches of forest outside towns in Java; these often contain quite good bird faunas, especially of some form of protection exists (which unfortunately is very rarely the case).
Erik