Abstract

In villages and cities across the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of songbird competitions are held every week. In these competitions, members of one species of songbird compete with each other, where the aesthetic qualities of the song, including its rhythm, melody, timbre, and volume, are evaluated by a team of referees. First prizes are large cash awards and sometimes cars.  A birdsong that incorporates motifs from other species is especially valued, and bird owners spend much time caringly teaching their birds the song of other species. Champion birds are traded for as much as 100,000 euros.  

The competitions are at the vortex of a »songbird craze«, called kicau-mania in Indonesia, that has emerged in the last two decades. Some 14 million songbirds, endemic to the region, are held captive on Java alone. The unsustainable industry of trapping and trading to satisfy the demand of Indonesian songbird lovers now threatens dozens of endemic species with extinction. 

Following bird trainers, owners, and referees, this audio paper investigates the awkward and »non-innocent care« that links multispecies love to extinction in the Asian Songbird Crisis. We argue that the aesthetics of Indonesian bird lovers – intimate, caring, situated, individual, and more-than-human – presents a challenge and a contrast, full of ambivalence, to the abstract, general, species-focused, and Romantic aesthetics at the heart of Western environmentalism in the Anthropocene.

The audio paper argues that an attention to the multiplicity of multispecies aesthetics is needed to avert the extinction of endemic species, a possibility that we will explore in the new research project »Aesthetics of Extinction«.

Credits

Speaker in order of appearance: Sanne Krogh Groth, Nils Bubandt and Tesla Manaf.

Sound editing and mastering: Tesla Manaf.

Thanks to Tina Quartey for letting us use fragments of the piece Lament for a Strip of Land, 2024 (commissioned by the Sound Environment Centre for the Sound Bench, Lund University).

Thanks also to Irfan, Robi and Eko Heru for generously sharing their bird knowledge and bird love with us. 

Read more about our research collaboration »Java-Futurism. Sonic Activism and Experimental music in Indonesia« funded by the Swedish Research Council (2019-02888) here. 

In September 2025 we began a two-year research project entitled »The Aesthetics of Extinction«, funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation, that will focus on Indonesian songbirds in order to explore this in more detail.  See more about this project at: https://cas.au.dk/en/extinction.

References in order of appearance:

»We live in a time of mass extinction …«, see Barnosky, A.D. et al. (2011). Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?, Nature, 471 (7336), pp. 51-57. doi:10.1038/nature09678.

»Of the 11,000 bird species in the world, half of them are in decline.…«, see BirdLife (2022). State of the World’s Birds 2022: Insights and Solutions for the Biodiversity Crisis. Cambridge: BirdLife International. Available at:  https://www.birdlife.org/papers-reports/state-of-the-worlds-birds-2022/. Accessed 3 January 2025.

»Our story is about one such kind of ‘non-innocent care’«. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

»Around 14 million songbirds are in captivity in Java alone…«, see Marshall, H., et al. (2020) Spatio-temporal Dynamics of Consumer Demand Driving the Asian Songbird Crisis. Biological Conservation 241: 108237.  

»More than forty species of songbirds, endemic to the region, are on the extinction watch-list…«, see TRAFFIC (2018) Asian Songbirds. Putting an End to Illegal Trapping and Unsustainable Pet Trade. Singapore: Traffic. Available at: https://www.traffic.org/what-we-do/species/asian-songbirds/#:~:text=Asian%20songbirds%20have%20reached%20crisis,for%20them%20as%20caged%20birds. Accessed 14 June 2022.

»Every year one million songbirds are removed….«, see Silalahi, M. (2020). The Deadly Trapping of Songbirds in Indonesia. In Earth. Journalism Network. 1 October 2020. Available at: https://earthjournalism.net/stories/the-deadly-trapping-of-songbirds-in-indonesia. Accessed 15 October 2024.

»You are listening to ‘Constant Wonder’. I am Eric Schulzke. We are going to be talking about songbirds this hour....«. BYU Radio. Constant Wonder. Episode: »Songbird Competition Causing Crisis in SE Asia«. 16 August 2021.  Available at: https://www.byuradio.org/51c2a605-8f53-4043-bcc3-3ebd3e79dbaf/keeping-songbirds-has-been-a-practice-in-southeast-asia-for-nearly-300-years-songbird-competition-causing-crisis-in-se-asia?player-open=true&content-id=51c2a605-8f53-4043-bcc3-3ebd3e79dbaf. Accessed 3 January 2025.

»It is really frenzied environment where all of the bird owners are screaming and shouting….« quote from: Inside the Illegal Songbird Trade in Indonesia, Seeker channel on Youtube, 2 March 2021. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w0sYKJlLds. Accessed 12 January 2025.

»We explore this more-than-human aesthetics as a musicologist and anthropologist.« Read more about our research collaboration here: https://javafuturism.blogg.lu.se. Accessed 12 January 2025.

»Set in the loud soundscape of the peri-urban spaces of Java….«, see Groth, Sanne Krogh & Nils Bubandt (2024), Noise without Noise: Art interventions in a Southeast Asian city. In Proceedings of the 53rd International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering Nantes, France, 25-29 August 2024. Nantes: Inter-Noise 2024. pp. 1-11. Available at: https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/195761441/IN_2024_3281.pdf Accessed 12 January 2025.

»….from the perspective of the Javanese men who nurture and compete songbirds ….«. For an elaboration of this argument, see Bubandt, Nils (2024) Birds after Geertz: The Rise and Fall of Songbirds in Indonesia. Indonesia 117:1-30. Available at:  https://pure.au.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/376784169/Bubandt_2024_Birds_After_Geertz.pdf

»There is a nostalgic quality to songbird love…«. For an elaboration of our argument, see Bubandt, Nils (2024) Birds after Geertz: The Rise and Fall of Songbirds in Indonesia. Indonesia 117:1-30. Available at:  https://pure.au.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/376784169/Bubandt_2024_Birds_After_Geertz.pdf

»This similarity between birdsong and human song contains its own more-than-human mystery….in the mythological past, people say, some birds were human.” For an elaboration of this argument, see Benamou, Marc (1997) Of Zebra Doves and Prawn Crackers: Javanese Metaphors for Vocal Types. In Brian A. Roberts (ed.) The Phenomenon of Singing. Proceedings of the International Symposium, St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada, Vol. 1, pp. 25-32; and Bubandt, Nils (2024). Birds after Geertz: The Rise and Fall of Songbirds in Indonesia. Indonesia 117:1-30. Available at:  https://pure.au.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/376784169/Bubandt_2024_Birds_After_Geertz.pdf

»But this love for the white-rumped shama or the long-tailed shrike also means that they, like dozens of other species, are critically endangered in the wild«, see Leupen, B. et al (2018) Trade in White-rumped Shamas (Kittacincla malabarica) Demands Strong National and International Responses. Forktail 34:1-8. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kanitha-Krishnasamy/publication/339840398_Trade_in_White-rumped_Shamas_Kittacincla_malabarica_demands_strong_national_and_international_responses/links/5e684ce3299bf1744f72c8f6/Trade-in-White-rumped-Shamas-Kittacincla-malabarica-demands-strong-national-and-international-responses.pdf. Accessed 13 January 2025; and Eaton, J.A. et al (2015) Trade-driven Extinctions and Near-extinctions of Avian Taxa in Sundaic Indonesia. Forktail 31:1-12. Available at https://www.silentforest.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Eaton-et-al-2015-Trade-driven-extinctions-and-near-extinctions-of-avian-taxa-in-Sundaic-Indonesia-2.pdf. Accessed 12 January 2025

»We need to attend in sensitive ways to the specific aesthetics of each extinction«. In September 2025 began a two-year research project entitled »The Aesthetics of Extinction«, funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation, that will focus on Indonesian songbirds in order to explore this in more detail. See more about this project at: https://cas.au.dk/en/extinction