Birdsong floats between the pavilions and shrines within the high walls of a traditional family compound in Bali. I’m here to meet the leader of a local conservation program, along with the birds his group has been breeding for the past six years.
As I walk through the compound, I pass caged birds hanging from rafters. Birds make common pets in Bongkasa Pertiwi, a village in the middle of the Indonesian island. I’ve been in Bali just over a week, and I’ve already seen countless cages hanging next to drying laundry in these compounds.
Across Indonesia the tradition of keeping songbirds goes back for centuries. Today one-third of households on Java, the most populous island in the archipelago, keep birds such as white-rumped shamas and magpie-robins. They’re status symbols and often treated as beloved members of the family, frequently entered as contestants in popular singing competitions. The whole practice is a point of cultural pride.
But the trade — worth billions of U.S. dollars — has ballooned unsustainably high. Many of the birds are caught from the wild, driving down tropical forest populations and fueling what researchers dub the Asian Songbird Crisis, with dozens of creatures facing increased risk of extinction.
That’s what makes the chirps I’m hearing in Bongkasa Pertiwi special. They come from more than 50 Bali myna (Leucopsar rothschildi), the official mascot of Bali and a critically endangered species.
I walk to the nearest cage and peer in. Two snow-white birds tilt their heads back at me.
They make a regal pair. Streaks of bare blue skin sharply define each eye. Most of their feathers are stark white: white chest, white wings, white plumes flaring proudly down their necks. The only other color is a splash of black on the tips of their tails and wings, like brushes dipped in ink.
The Bali myna, also known as the Bali starling or the jalak Bali (ᬚᬮᬓ᭄ᬩᬮᬶ), is a beautiful bird — so beautiful, in fact, that covetous humans nearly drove them to extinction. In the 1970s collector demand for the birds surged. For decades poachers could make more than a year’s local salary for nabbing a pair and selling them on the black market. The population plummeted.
Twenty years ago experts estimated that fewer than 10 Bali mynas remained in the wild. The bird was well on track to share the mournful fate of the Bali tiger, a subspecies of big cat that once prowled the island and inspired its folklore before being hunted to extinction in the 1950s.
But then, against all odds, the storyline appears to have shifted. Although nothing is certain, today scientists on Bali talk about the myna with cautious hope.
A Community Effort
One of the Bali myna’s strongholds is West Bali National Park, part of their historic range, where hundreds of the birds now fly.
“Research suggests the population is viable and will continue to increase,” says Tom Squires, an ecologist who spent years studying the bird for his doctoral thesis at Manchester Metropolitan University. Squires was the lead author of a paper published last year that found steady improvements in the mynas’ population over the past decade.
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Outside the park dozens of Bali mynas have been released in various independent efforts to expand their range, including here in Bongkasa Pertiwi, about 60 miles to the southeast.
As we shake hands and sit down in the compound, Agung Rai Astawa is quiet, almost distant, but his voice grows earnest and firm when he starts to talk about the local effort he leads, run out of a volunteer’s family home. The wiry 50-year-old works in stonemasonry, an ancient craft that adorns the walled compounds and temples of the island. He’s also one of about 20 community members taking care of native birds, including more than 50 Bali mynas and 50 black-winged mynas (Acridotheres melanopterus), another critically endangered species.
The program has been running since 2018, when an Indonesian bottled-water company launched the initiative. The company donated six birds bought from legal breeders and a handful of cages to start it.
The villagers amended their awig-awig — collective agreements that serve as local customary law — to forbid poaching of the birds.
“The community is required to preserve the balance of nature,” Astawa says. If someone is caught hunting the birds, “his photo is put up in the village office to embarrass him.”
Breeding Bali mynas remains a fairly regulated endeavor, given the endangered and symbolic status of the species.
“We can’t be careless,” Astawa tells me. They need approval to release any captive birds, each of which gets a birth certificate from the government. Breeders also face fines if a bird dies from lack of care.
Ideally the village benefits with the flock. Tourists can pay $3.50 to see the beautiful white birds. Visitors already stop by the town for river rafting and an Instagram-famous swing, where they snap pictures dangling their legs above a tropical forest.
What’s happening on this family compound in the uplands is just one of myriad conservation efforts in Bali pairing nature protection with economic benefits for local communities. So far the approach seems to be working.
“I’ve come to wonder why I didn’t do this sooner,” says Astawa. “Now things are finally getting better.”
Bongkasa Pertiwi lies outside the bird’s native range, but the dozens being raised and released here help insure the overall population.
“I still think the national park is the center of efforts,” Squires later tells me, since that’s where the birds flew historically. But he highlighted the value of these separate programs. “We’ve always hoped to increase the range, so all the eggs aren’t in one basket.”
People Were the Problem; People Are the Solution
“I was born in Bali, I grew up in Bali, and I want to die in Bali.”
Bayu Wirayudha loves his home, both its wildlife and its people. The middle-aged leader of Friends of Nature, People and Forests, a nonprofit founded in 1997, was wearing his long black hair pulled back in a bun. He smiled often and widely, with spirited words to match, while describing his community-inclusive approach to conservation.
“Working with animals alone will not save the species,” he says.
In 2006 his organization approached villages scattered across three islands southeast of Bali, an administrative district named Nusa Penida after the largest island of the archipelago. The nonprofit wanted to create a bird sanctuary there to protect all sorts of native species. But in a country like Indonesia with such a deeply embedded caged bird culture — a popular Javanese saying equates manhood with possession of a bird, along with a house, wife, horse, and traditional dagger — they knew they needed community support before releasing any.
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So Friends of Nature began an awareness campaign. They approached leaders in each village, asked temple committees to share information about the initiative, and even presented at weddings with permission from the couples.
In general, Wirayudha says, they based their case on the importance of protecting nature, often evoking older generations’ memories of the songbird music that soundtracked their childhoods.
But equally important in their persuasion was an economic promise.
Tourism accounts for over half of Bali’s gross domestic product. In general the global industry is rife with contradictions and questions over whom it benefits. While foreigners might perceive a flawless eco-paradise in Bali, with hotels promising sustainability and connection to the earth, the industry still strains the island’s ancient irrigation system and litters the landscape with plastic.
However, according to Wirayudha, the allure of tourism can encourage conservation, leading to benefits for both residents and the environment if done responsibly.
“When we protect the Bali myna, more and more tourists come,” he says. The additional stream of income provides an incentive to stop poaching.
In addition to promoting the island as a destination, the organization gives scholarships to students and hosts a variety of workshops helping farmers. Wirayudha’s general philosophy with Friends of Nature is to address the needs of humans along with animals, to the benefit of both.
“We bring opportunity,” he says. “And so, people are happy.”
Back in 2006 every one of the roughly three dozen villages across Nusa Penida added varying degrees of protection for birds to their awig-awig. Some protect only critically endangered species, others all — but each village prohibits the poaching of Bali mynas.
Today songbirds fly free; tourists come to take photos. The sanctuary has been so successful that villages on Bali’s main island have approached Friends of Nature about starting similar programs.
“Our biggest ambition is to get this bird off the critically endangered list,” says Wirayudha. “That one day it will be common.”
Loans Pay Off
A hundred miles to the northwest, West Bali National Park has seen an equally successful turnaround in recent years. These are the Bali myna’s native skies, home to the longest and largest conservation effort for the species.
In the 1980s, when the park established the first captive-breeding and release program for the species, rampant poaching consistently thwarted efforts to raise population levels. In 1999 thieves even robbed the facility at gunpoint and stole 39 birds.
The strategy wasn’t working.
Then, in 2006, the park started loaning birds to Balinese breeders.
Across the island the trade was once again made legal. Breeders could raise and sell Bali mynas, with a stipulation: They had to give 10% of the birds they raised to West Bali National Park for release. This involves monthly population reports, which are regularly verified in person by government staff.
It can be a controversial tactic. After the Indonesian government removed the critically endangered Javan pied starling (rare in the wild, but easy to find on the market) from its list of protected species in 2018, allowing its sale, some ecologists protested. The Indonesian Institute of Sciences issued a letter recommending a reversal.
While legalizing the trade of a critically endangered species may seem counterintuitive, it has reportedly drastically shriveled the black market for the Bali myna. At one point poachers could bag up to $2,000 or more for a pair. Now, sources tell me, the sale would make just a few hundred. That’s still a hefty amount, a sizable portion of local monthly salaries, but the drop makes a difference. Additionally, interested buyers can easily purchase from legitimate breeders, driving down demand for illicit sources.
“When you have a legal bird,” Wirayudha says, “why would you buy the illegal one?”
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Granted, some collectors still choose the latter. The breeding loan program alone didn’t save the species, according to Squires, who highlighted the importance of other conservation efforts like captive breeding programs. But it has certainly made poaching far less alluring, while still allowing bird sellers an important source of income. The forests sound with more Bali myna chirps each year.
Most recently the park has begun shifting nest boxes, set up for recently released birds, from an isolated habitat to the surrounding, human-dominated landscape. The birds evolved to live in the savannah, and recent research suggests they fare better on farmland than dense woods.
Of course, this cohabitation takes the cooperation of residents. It takes trust that no one will kidnap and sell the released snow-white birds, even if they’re perched temptingly in the backyard.
Yet Wirayudha believes the wellbeing of birds and humans has never been totally separate, and neither has their habitat. And Squires reports that the two are getting along well, so far, in their shared swaths of land.
“Previously, the goal was to keep the birds away from people, as the primary threat,” he says. “But these are the best habitats for them, and the population is growing quickly.”
It Takes an Ecosystem
“In Indonesia, we think of the tiger when we think of conservation,” says biologist Ali Imron. The last confirmed Bali tiger was shot in 1937; the Javan tiger followed it into extinction in the 1970s.
Imron is originally from Sumatra, the largest island in Indonesia. There Sumatran tigers still prowl the dense tropical rainforests, although they’re critically endangered from poaching, conflict with farmers, and deforestation. Around 600 remain in the wild, roughly the same as the number of Bali mynas.
Imron has spent years working with pangolins, gibbons, and water snakes. Now he works for Begawan Foundation, a philanthropic organization started by a British couple that runs a Bali myna breeding program. He noted the importance of protecting all of nature, not just mynas or tigers but whole ecosystems, including the people within them.
“Conservation you cannot do by yourself,” he said. “You have to work together with local people.”
In an era when more than 10,000 species are assessed as critically endangered, the Bali myna and the people protecting them — whether by researching them, raising them, or simply not poaching them — offer an important lesson. Saving a species takes bottom-up community work; in other words, it takes a village.
While the story of these beautiful white birds still hangs fairly in the balance, according to Squires, “we are carefully hopeful.”
Previously in The Revelator:
