Bird trappers fly in the face of rules protecting species at risk
The Times
27 December 1991
Michael Hornsby
Fluttering in the caraiba trees along the riverbanks of northeastern Brazil is a lone Spix's macaw, the most spectacular victim of the illegal trade in exotic wild birds. The vivid blue parrot, for which collectors would pay thousands of pounds, is thought to be the last of its kind left in the wild.
Spix's macaw is one of many birds threatened with extinction by illegal trapping and sale despite protected status under the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (Cites). However, much of this multi-million pound business - some 20 million birds are traded world wide each year - is entirely lawful.
The European Community, which imports up to three million birds a year from Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, is under growing pressure to ban the trade. The European parliament voted in September for such action, and 46 international airlines, including British Airways, refuse to carry wild birds.
Much of the driving force behind the anti-trade campaign comes from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Environmental Investigation Agency. They are to publish a new report on the wild bird trade on Monday detailing evidence of fraud and the high mortality rate of birds in transit. However, the case for a ban is not universally accepted. Among sceptics is the International Council for Bird Preservation (ICBP) in Cambridge. Christoph Imboden, its Swiss director-general, said: "Bans are the right answer for some species. But a total trade embargo would be too simplistic an approach when so many different economic interests are involved."
The council classifies 1,000 of the world's 9,000 bird species as "globally threatened". Two-thirds live in tropical forests. Indonesia has the most, followed by Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Thailand and the Philippines. Trade is blamed for the decline of up to half the 75 endangered parrot species, but habitat destruction is a bigger threat for most birds.
The Bali starling, down to under 17 in the wild at one point, is a striking victim of illegal trapping. About 1,000 of the pure white birds exist in zoos and some have been placed in the wild, raising the population to about 30. Loss of tropical forest, rather than trade, is mainly blamed for reducing the thrush-sized Gurney's pitta to about 30 in southern Thailand.
Red siskins, members of the finch family, may number fewer than 600, confined to Venezuela and parts of Colombia. They are much in demand, especially in Italy, because they interbreed with yellow canaries to produce a red bird that sings. Attempts are being made to breed pure siskins for return to the wild.
The trade is lucrative, but mainly for the middle-men. Blue-fronted Amazon parrots sold by trappers for ú1.20 in Argentina fetch ú250 in the United States. Plum-headed parakeets, for which trappers in India are paid no more than 25p, sell for up to ú70 in Britain. A pair of hyacinth macaws were recently offered at ú25,000.
The anti-trade lobby argues that the Cites controls can be bypassed too easily, for example by hiding rare species among more common, legally tradeable birds, by forging export permits and by under declaring consignments that exceed quotas. The lobby says that the trade should be ended on welfare grounds alone.
About 13 per cent of the 185,000 birds exported annually to Britain arrive dead or die in quarantine according to government figures. However, the RSPCA estimates that up to 60 per cent of wild-caught birds die of dehydration, stress or other maltreatment in their countries of origin. So perhaps only one in four birds captured makes it to the pet shop.
EC governments (including Britain's) have resisted calls for a trade ban. They argue that tightened transport and import rules and improved monitoring of populations are preferable. That view is shared by the ICBP and Traffic International, which monitors trade for the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Steven Broad, of Traffic, says monk parakeets, of which there are 16 million in South America, are slaughtered in thousands every year by farmers who see them as crop pests. Trying to ban export of such common species would, he says, be pointless.
Under Cites, exporting countries are supposed to limit trade to what bird populations can sustain, but few have sufficient data.
