They’ve done it again!

We guess that few of you have missed the horrible pictures of cockatoos stuffed in plastic water bottles. The pictures have gone “viral” on internet and I (Lena) completely lost it for a couple of days. It was quite easy to loose hope in mankind, when that helpless cockatoo stared me in the eyes on my computer screen.

Here is the article, PLEASE be aware of very graphic pictures!!

The cockatoos were Yellow-crested Cockatoos – Cacatua sulphurea which are critically endangered with an estimated world population of 1500-7000 mature individuals according to BirdLife International.

So this species really doesn’t need to loose ANY individuals to smugglers!

There are so many problems to address here so we don’t really know where to start.

First problem is of course demand! Legislation in Indonesia is way behind and can’t be used to stop the trade. The official list of endangered animals in Indonesia is embarrassingly short.

Fortunately this confiscation has sparked an outcry on the matter and there is a petition on Change.org with a demand to revise the outdated legislations. Please sign it to help protect Indonesian wildlife. The petition is in Indonesian, the signing bit is in English.

Second problem is poverty. Trapping birds is a way to put food on the table for poor families in remote areas and it is symbiotic to the demand. If there was no demand, these poor locals wouldn’t catch animals. And if they weren’t poor they wouldn’t supply the smugglers who answer to the demand…We don’t have a solution to this one, but finding other ways to earn money would be ideal.

We ourselves believe in gentle tourism. It is a brilliant way to give locals an income and also to educate them on the reason we travel across the world to see an animal that they are taking for granted.

There was an article published yesterday on Mongabay that gives hope about the public outcry in Indonesia on this matter, but it is also a cause for concern.

Suddenly people are prone to set their pet birds free. And the Forestry Minister is cited that the cockatoos come from the Moluccas (according to the smuggler they were caught in Sulawesi and the Yellow-crested Cockatoo is NOT endemic to the Moluccas). She is also cited to want to release the surviving birds on a mountain in Java.

We sincerely hope that the journalists have got it all wrong and that the Forestry Minister is on top of it all!

In this article it actually sound like there is an amnesty for turning in illegal wildlife, which would be good. Hopefully they also have a plan what to do with all the animals they receive.

A third problem we need to address on this matter is the massive bureaucracy involved in conservation. In order to work with a species we need to obtain a permission from each region.

This means in order to work with the Yellow-crested Cockatoo, we’d need to obtain permissions from Nusa Tneggara Timur, Nusa Tenggara Barat, Timor, south Sulawesi and Java (Cs abbotti).

But it feels like there is room for a dialouge now, when the news about cockatoos have travelled around the world and also within Indonesia.