Location: Central Highland and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Sponsors: Keidanren Nature Conservation Fund (KNCF)

Years: 2024

Collaborator(s)/Partner(s): BirdLife International

Songbirds here are prized for their cultural, religious, and recreational significance and the songbird trade is a major aspect of the wildlife trade, involving both legal and illegal markets. The most recent study conducted by TRAFFIC in 2016 reported a total of 8,047 individuals of 115 bird species in the two largest cities – Ho Chi Minh and Ha Noi (Eaton et al. 2017). Another study on the online bird trade carried out by Leupen et al. (2022) showed a total of 834 individuals of at least 50 species by 434 posts. Evidently, there is a huge market for birds as pets and songbirds all across Vietnam, however, there are relatively few studies on the wild bird trade (Moiser et al. 2009; Edmunds et al. 2011; Nguyễn et al. 2013; Eatonet al. 2017; Hoàng & Cao 2019) and almost all of them are small-scale and discrete, focusing on the trade in large cities such as Ha Noi, Ho Chi Minh City and in some provinces such as Dong Thap and Thanh Hoa province. Our work seeks to expand the body of knowledge on the wild bird trade in Vietnam, by contributing updated physical market survey data and by conducting surveys in provinces that have not been as intensely studied in the past.

We aimed to survey at least 30 shops to obtain key information on the domestic songbird trade, including details on the songbirds traded, their selling price and to understand the differences in the nature of the trade between cities in Vietnam.

Songbird trade