There is a saying in Java: “A man is considered to be a real man if he has a house, a wife, a horse, a dagger and a bird.”

Birds are the most popular pet in Indonesia, sought as living objets d’art, good luck charms or, in the case of rare species, status symbols.

This national fondness, however, is taking a toll. Last year, in a three-day survey of Jakarta’s three largest bird markets — one of which is Asia’s biggest, if not the world’s — investigators working with Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring group, found more than 19,000 birds representing more than 200 species.

“While we expected the numbers to be high, nearly 20,000 birds is very alarming,” said Chris Shepherd, Traffic’s regional director in Southeast Asia. “The diversity of the birds in the market, including threatened species, is also terrifying.”