In celebration of National Bird Day 2015, Barry Kent MacKay, Senior Program Associate for Born Free USA and lifelong bird enthusiast, is writing a special eight-part blog series in December and January where he will describe some interesting avian species. Below is the sixth installment.
I was a kid, maybe nine or 10, when my mother described an odd little bird she had seen in a pet store. Even then, I knew all of the local bird species by sight—but I couldn’t place this one. The very next day, I was amazed to see a strange little bird sitting on the steps of my public school. I knew immediately that it was not native, with its heavy pink bill, very narrow reddish eye-ring, boldly white cheek patch on an otherwise black head, perfectly smooth gray body plumage, and wine-colored wash across the belly. Comical, clownish, exotic… I was mesmerized. And, knowing that it had to have escaped from captivity, I tried, unsuccessfully, to catch it. What was it? [teaserbreak] In fact, I soon started to see them in cages in pet stores everywhere. It was given several names, including Java sparrow, Java temple bird, Java rice bird, and others. In those pre-internet days, I had to visit the museum library to learn about it. The Java finch is native only to the islands of Java and Bali, and maybe nearby Madura, adjacent to Java. It used to be abundant, flying around open country in large flocks. That made it easy for bird netters to catch. And, its pretty colors and patterns, and its ability to exist on a simple-to-provide diet of rice and other seeds, made it an obvious choice for the commercial bird trade. It was caught in vast numbers, probably for centuries, but most intensely in the middle of the 20th century.
The Java finch is the largest member of the family of birds called the Estrilididae, commonly referred to as the Estrilidid finches. It is a huge family (more than 130 species) found only in the Eastern Hemisphere, and with main centers of distribution in Africa and Australasia. They are often boldly-marked, colorful birds, many very small in size, and mostly seed eaters, thus often sought for the commercial bird trade. The family includes the waxbills, parrotfinches, and the nuns and munias. Many species have been domesticated. Some are rare or little known, while others are abundant and very well known where they occur in the wild.
However charming it may be, in its homeland, the Java finch is widely considered to be a pest because of its taste for rice. And, although small, it was abundant enough to be killed for human consumption. Additionally, it may well be that pesticides used on rice further reduced the population to the point that this once-abundant species is now extremely difficult to find in the wild on the huge island for which it was named. A few years ago, a survey of 64 locations where it had once occurred found birds at only 17 of them—for a total of only 109 birds. Decades ago, that would have been just an ordinary, not particularly large, flock. The population is in serious decline, and the species could eventually be gone from its home range.
Perhaps paradoxically, though, it is not endangered worldwide. There are believed to be small but substantial populations established in the wild as “alien” or “invasive” species in China, Taiwan, Florida, and Hawaii. While the bird trade has been widely identified as the primary cause of the precipitous decline in the species, there is now a large, self-sustaining population of cage birds: birds who will never know what it is like to fly across the tropical landscape in the company of thousands of their kind. And, as is typical of birds kept in captivity to the point of domestication, different color variations have been created through selective breeding.
In 1995, legal export of the birds from Java and Bali was banned. That still does not protect it from local use or persecution, and there are only three protected parks or reserves in Java, and only one in Bali. It is listed on Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which monitors international trade and determines whether any take from the wild is “sustainable.” But, there remains a strong likelihood that it will become extinct in its homeland. There is need for the strictest enforcement of trade restrictions and of meeting market demand with captive-bred birds; examination of the threats of pesticide use and persecution; and consideration of competition from other species. Even if all of that is done, the outlook for the Java finch in Java and Bali is bleak.