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Evaluating the impacts of law enforcement and market outreach campaigns on the Indonesian caged bird trade in Kalimantan
Indonesia is the epicenter of the Asian songbird crisis, yet few studies test whether enforcement and outreach can curb trade. We evaluated a combined market-outreach and law-enforcement program targeting caged birds in West Kalimantan. We compiled 2014–2025 data from annual surveys of 374 bird shops and 2019–2025 Facebook sales data from thousands of seller accounts. We analyzed temporal changes in bird abundance using negative binomial and logistic mixed models. In physical markets, sales of protected species declined by 40–59% relative to pre- intervention levels, and the share of shops selling protected species fell from 88.7% to 21.6%. Using a dose-response model, districts with more arrests showed progressively fewer birds per shop, with especially strong declines in protected species. Online, protected species per post and per seller account declined by 5–8% per year, while non-protected species remained broadly stable. These results show that trader outreach coupled with consistent enforcement can sharply suppress open trade in protected songbirds. The intervention appears to shift markets toward non- protected taxa rather than simply displacing trade to new venues. Our findings provide rare quantitative evidence that entrenched wildlife trades respond to targeted interventions and offer a scalable model for reducing illegal bird trade in Indonesia.
Key points
- Market Decline: Sales of protected species in physical markets fell by 40–59%, and the percentage of shops selling protected species dropped from 88.7% to 21.6%
- Enforcement Impact: Each additional district-level arrest was associated with a 47.7% reduction in protected species per shop. Non-protected species remained stable, suggesting the intervention reduced trade rather than displacing it.
- Online Trends: Listings of protected species declined by 5–8% annually, while non-protected listings remained flat.
- Structural Change: The total number of active bird shops in the 14 surveyed districts decreased from 113 in 2017 to 32 in 2025.
Suggested citation
Miller, A., Ahmad, A., Nurhad, A., Mulyawarman, A., Sartika, I., Sagita, N., & Kartikawat, S. M. (2026). Evaluating the impacts of law enforcement and market outreach campaigns on the Indonesian caged bird trade in Kalimantan. Global Ecology and Conservation, e04193.
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