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Birds keeping, especially songbirds, has been considered as one of the major drivers that lead to species extinction in Indonesia. The demand for songbirds either for songbird’s competition or to be enjoyed at home is considerably high, especially in Java. As the native Javan population has been depleted due to habitat conversion and excessive trapping, the supply of songbirds is provided by other islands in Indonesia such as Sumatera and Kalimantan. We conducted long term monitoring of songbird’s trade on Jambi. Data on bird’s trade was obtained by examining the transaction records from wholesalers from the period of 2016 – 2020. The results showed that there were shifting in species target especially after 2018 due to implementation of new regulation on protected species. However, the total number remains high. The trade comparison for the same period between trade records in 2016 and 2020 demonstrated the reduction in the number of species from around 32 species to 25 species, however, the total volume of traded birds is higher in 2020 which is 20.600 compare to 7.198 during the first sixth months. Considering the pandemic situation, the songbirds trade activities is seemingly not affected especially for the distribution chain from hunter to wholesalers.

Birds market survey has been proofed to be effective as a complementary method to evaluate the population of birds in the wild. We implemented this method to monitor the birds trade in Jambi. Rather than direct observation to the market, we examine the transaction records from three wholesalers to obtain data. Our results show that during the period of January-September 2017 the total birds traded is 11,660 specimens and transaction value is Rp 941,932,900.00. Number of generic species is 76 in which some names refer to same species. From those generic species, we can identify about 26 species and the rest of birds is grouped according to their genus or family by which consist of 11 kind of birds. There are 4 species (and group of species) that traded over 1000 specimens i.e Acridotheres javanicus (2,824), Chloropsis sp. (2,185), Garrulax mitratus (1,266), and Zosterops sp. (1,355). The expensive songbirds such as Pycnonotus zeylanicus and Kittacincla malabarica are absent but the least expensive species but favorable, Copsychus saularis, is only traded in small number (157 specimens). Combine field survey and market survey may give better picture of overall bird population that critical for setting up conversation strategy of Indonesian birds.