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

Important insights into wildlife trade can be gained from monitoring different selling platforms (Aloysius et al. 2019; Siriwat and Nijman 2020), with much research focusing on physical markets (e.g. Shepherd 2006, 2011; Chng et al. 2015, 2018a, b; Chng and Eaton 2016; Shepherd et al. 2016; Nijman et al. 2017; Rentschlar et al. 2018; Bergin et al. 2018; Iskandar et al. 2019; Shepherd and Leupen 2021; Putri et al. 2021; Leupen et al. 2022b). Comparatively, there have been few studies looking at online trade (Iqbal 2015; Fink et al. 2021; Okarda et al. 2022). Our study looked to characterise the online trade with focus on songbirds, and to compare with those on sale at physical markets. We found a higher species richness within the Facebook selling groups, for a given volume of birds sold, than in physical markets, but, the difference was not significant. While there was a large proportion of threatened, protected, and conservation priority species for sale online, this was no more than that in physical markets, although the latter did have a higher relative abundance of protected species. It may be that some online trading groups are hotbeds of particularly rare, valuable and endangered taxa, as found elsewhere (Krishnasamy and Stoner 2016) but our Facebook groups acted similarly to physical markets. Some unprotected species still have an annual harvest quota (Government Regulation No.8/1999 on Wild Flora and Fauna Exploitation) for trading of wild individuals, whereby if its exceeded, further trade is prohibited, therefore they enjoy some level of protection. Importantly, the communities of birds for sale differed markedly across platforms, with a distinct spatial separation found between Facebook and physical markets. For example, the physical markets were largely comprised of Estrildidae and had a larger number of white-eyes comparatively to online trade. This concurs with Leupen et al. (2022a) findings who believes this is due to both having low monetary value and the target audience of the species, as White-eyes most commonly appeal to older men that would most likely prefer the traditional, physical markets. However, it contrasts with the findings of Siriwat (2020) who found no significant difference between species composition of a range of taxa between physical markets and Facebook selling groups. However, this study had a smaller focus group centring only on birds of prey, therefore likely having different trade dynamics driven by taxon-specific demand attributes and fewer species on offer.

Recent years have seen a movement away from traditional brick-and-mortar markets to the virtual marketplace (Lavorgna 2014; Siriwat and Nijman 2020). This shift has been observed across multiple countries (e.g. China: Yu and Jia 2015, Thailand: Siriwat and Nijman 2020, Vietnam: Leupen et al. 2022a) and taxa (e.g. wild cats: Nijman et al. 2019, reptiles: Marshall et al. 2020b, raptors: Siriwat 2020, mammals: Thomas et al. 2021). This change may be due to escalated enforcement in physical markets (Siriwat and Nijman 2020) – for example, the trade of Indian Star Tortoises Geochelone elegans in Malaysia was found to have significantly decreased in markets and pet shops while increasingly larger numbers are being advertised for sale on online platforms (Chng and Bouhuys 2015). The worldwide pandemic of the COVID-19 coronavirus increased awareness about the danger of animal markets in spreading zoonotic diseases and was likely to have accelerated the movement away from physical markets to online trade (Wittig 2020). These online platforms enable sellers to more easily reach a wider audience and give the option for anonymity (Lavorgna 2014; Yu and Jia 2015).

The important question is how much we should be concerned about online trade in Indonesian songbirds as compared to that in physical markets. In our study, species richness did differ significantly between online and physical market-based trade, with several Facebook groups offering greater than expected species numbers given their overall traffic (Fig. 2). Similarly, Toomes et al. (2023) found high diversity in the online pet trade in Australia, especially among threatened taxa. While our Facebook groups certainly offered threatened and illegal birds, they did so in similar proportions to the physical markets and, in this respect, we suggest these online platforms are acting as extensions of physical markets. This concurs with Sung and Fong (2018) who found that species diversity of turtles being sold online was comparable to that found in physical stores. But perhaps not with Nijman et al. (2022) who found differences in the sizes of birds of prey found on sale in online and physical markets in Indonesia, where typically smaller birds were found being sold in the markets and larger species found online.

Our study aimed to compare bird communities across platforms, not to quantify the volume of online trade. This is a huge task, as seen by the number of active Facebook selling groups found online when replacing deleted groups during this study (see also Iqbal 2015). The groups chosen were large, broad spectrum groups, but only captured a tiny proportion of online trade, and explicitly excluded Facebook groups that focus on specific taxa (e.g. Crested Jay Platylophus galericulatus: Komunitas Cililin Indonesia - www.​facebook.​com/​groups/​2385504398388102​). A considerable volume of trade is done on private Whatsapp groups and other platforms (Wyatt et al. 2022). For example, there has been a shift in online mammal trade away from Facebook, with primates appearing in WhatsApp groups recently showing a ten-fold increase over that openly traded in Facebook (J. Menner pers. obs). This is likely happening as mammals and primates are recognised by Facebook’s mechanisms to combat trade, in comparison to WhatsApp, where there is an apparent oversight. This does not yet apply to birds as currently the awareness of illegality or illegitimacy is not as prominent as in primates, therefore means they are less likely to be banned (J. Menner pers. obs). Finally, trade on the dark web, although at present appearing far less important in terms of volume than other platforms (Harrison et al. 2016; Stringham et al. 2023) this may change of course, especially if policing of current platforms becomes stricter (Stringham et al. 2023). Our study relied on manual checking of bird-selling posts and identification to species, but use of AI bird identification could allow for much greater samples of posts to be scrutinised. Web scraping software would also be a useful tool for monitoring online trade on websites that allow it, (Stringham et al. 2020; Mutiaradita et al. 2023), however, this is prohibited on Facebook. Preliminary data on AI cagebird identification in Indonesia suggest good accuracy rates (Shukhova et al. 2022) and it is likely that this technology will allow for faster identification and therefore more widespread monitoring of online platforms used for trade. Interestingly, the machine learning web-scraping model considered in our comparisons (Okarda et al. 2022) contained a very low species number given its huge sample of individual bird posts. It may well be that automated approaches harvest large amounts of data but lack, at present, the resolution to identify difficult taxa to species (e.g. Zosterops) or simply miss rare but important taxa (Stringham et al. 2020; Hachemin 2023). In our ordination, the machine learning model, based on adverts from dedicated bird-selling internet sites, had a bird community more similar to the physical markets than to our Facebook groups suggesting some degree of niche or specialism within some Facebook communities (Siriwat and Nijman 2020). Additionally, the physical markets showed some clustering based on their geographic location, with markets in closer physical proximity being found more similar, shown on the NMDS model. Useful tools are emerging for large scale monitoring of both physical and online trade in Indonesian songbirds and other wildlife (Cardoso et al. 2023).

Interestingly, there does not seem to be any tendency for the older physical market surveys to be ‘outliers’ in terms of their bird communities. In fact, the markets that clustered closest to each other and to the Facebook groups include both older and newer markets. It is expected that there will be temporal changes in bird occurrence in markets over the years (Tella and Hiraldo 2014), as also evidenced by recent large numbers of confiscations of Cisticolidae (birds not usually found in markets in great numbers) in Sumatra and Java (Guciano et al. 2023). With these points in mind, we must interpret our comparisons between online and physical markets cautiously.

Our results highlight the heterogeneity in bird communities offered across platforms and geographies, differences that may also be mirrored seasonally or annually, and in response to bird availability, demand, and reaction of the trade to enforcement efforts (Tella and Hiraldo 2014; Xu et al. 2020).