- Hong Kong and Singapore, two Asian wildlife trade hubs, imported more than a million live wild birds, nearly two-thirds from Africa between 2006 and 2020, according to a new analysis of customs data. Canaries, including species declining in the wild, topped the list.
- More than two-thirds of the birds came from African countries where export regulations are weak, including Mali, Guinea, Tanzania and Mozambique.
- This massive live bird trade depletes wild populations and may spread dangerous diseases or invasive species, researchers say.
- Experts urge countries to restrict imports of live birds, implement stricter quarantine measures and adopt an approved list of pets that don’t pose risks to biodiversity or human health.
Worldwide, people buy and hunt nearly half of the 11,000 bird species in existence. In Asia, Europe, and North and South America, songbirds and parrots are highly desired pets. Collectors pay exorbitant sums for rare species or melodious birds to compete in high-stakes singing competitions. Falconers and sport hunters capture or kill raptors. Belief-based rituals in West Africa incorporate vulture parts. Buyers in North America seek dead hornbills and hummingbirds as home décor. The list goes on.
This massive commerce threatens more than 200 avian species with extinction. Now, as online marketplaces proliferate, customers can order a bird with a swipe on their phone from anywhere on the planet.
Moving birds around the world also spreads deadly diseases, from avian influenza to circovirus, and when non-native birds get loose, they may proliferate, outcompeting residents.
“There’s a lack of awareness and appreciation for the scale of this trade, and little attention on the impacts that this could be having on wild populations or the risks for the spread of invasive species and infectious diseases,” said Rowan Martin, director of bird trade at the nonprofit World Parrot Trust. “If people are not aware that this is even happening, then how are we going to be able to mitigate the risks associated with it?”
In an attempt to understand the scale of the live bird trade, Martin and his colleagues used records from U.N. Comtrade, a database that aggregates information on all commodities traded between countries. The team analyzed live bird imports into Singapore and Hong Kong — the hubs of wildlife trade in Asia — between 2006 and 2020. They also examined species-specific import data from Hong Kong and published their findings in the journal Conservation Biology.
More than a million birds in trade, and growing
While Martin called the study a “snapshot of the trade,” the researchers documented huge numbers of birds flowing to the two Asian wildlife trade hubs, mostly from Africa: More than 1 million live birds over the study’s 15-year period came into the two hubs. Singapore pulled in almost three-quarters of them.
Canaries (Crithagra spp.), songbirds with eye-catching feathers, topped the list of birds brought into Hong Kong. Two species in particular — the yellow-fronted canary (C. mozambica) and white-rumped seedeater (C. leucopygia) — accounted for 84% of recorded imports from Africa between 2015 and 2020.
Though they aren’t yet at risk of extinction, populations of four of the most sought-after canaries are declining in the wild.
“The findings are not really surprising to us, as we have been observing the same trends,” said bird trade researcher Simon Bruslund from the Copenhagen Zoo. He said he’d just seen a black-throated canary (C. atrogularis) from Africa offered for sale at a market in Indonesia.
Wildlife trade is dynamic, and the species sold, trade routes and key hubs of commerce change over time in response to what customers want, levels of enforcement and profits. Bruslund, who was not involved in the study, said the same applies here. “The trade is certainly not static and exporters quickly adapt to opportunities.”
Trade is regulated for about 14% of all bird species under CITES, a global treaty that regulates commercial trade in plants and wildlife. Nearly 5,000 species are known to be on the market, but only about 1,600 are protected under CITES. It’s unknown how many birds are pulled or poached from the wild and how that damages populations, experts say.
While the Comtrade data are not extensive, can be inconsistent and lack species information, they show the massive scale of trade, which raises alarm bells for both exporting and importing countries, the researchers wrote. Bruslund said that its data are “important for detecting new trends early.”
Africa hub of live bird exports
About two-thirds of the birds, some 65%, came from Africa, most from the wild, Martin’s team found. They tallied roughly 150,000 birds from 34 species of African songbirds shipped to Hong Kong, one of the few places in Asia where species-level data are available for imported wildlife. Mali, Guinea, Tanzania and Mozambique exported the most birds.
“African birds are prominent because there’s been very little regulation of the exports,” Martin said. “There are relatively few large-scale exporters operating in West Africa, and often these family businesses have big holding facilities where they aggregate birds prior to export, and social media has facilitated connections to new potential buyers.”
Historically, the U.S. and the EU were the main destinations for Africa’s wild bird exports. About 70% of those that were legally traded between 1995 and 2005 came from Guinea, Mali and Senegal, with most headed to the EU, according to a 2017 study in the journal Science Advances. The EU banned all trade in wild birds in 2005.
Mali, in particular, played a significant role in the export of wild birds in recent years. Martin said they have received reports that birds that are trapped elsewhere in West Africa are often exported from Mali with fraudulent permits that falsely claim they’d come from there. For instance, his research found Mali shipped African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) before that trade was banned — although these birds are not native to the country.
In 2007, Ghana removed 114 bird species from CITES Appendix III, which regulates exports with permits from that country and monitors the legal trade originating there. It was one of the largest such deletions to date, and it’s made monitoring trade extremely difficult.
“These species were traded before the delisting, but we had actual numbers … After delisting, the trade became ‘invisible,’ but obviously continued,” Bruslund said.
In a 2025 study, he and his colleagues documented that U.S. imports of African species removed from CITES surged 14-fold on average, going from almost zero in 2006 to nearly 40,000 in 2007 and dropping to about 20,000 in 2008.
This current research found that bird imports into Hong Kong and Singapore increased after 2006, with more birds arriving from Africa. Martin credits the increase to rising middle-class wealth and affordability in Asia, as well as a growing population and social media that’s driving demand for exotic pets — and more flight connections that make transport easier.
By 2018, the trade began to decline, possibly because countries like Tanzania banned all wild animal exports two years before, and on the other end of the pipeline, Singapore stopped imports of ornamental birds from countries that had recent avian flu outbreaks. Declining populations of popular birds may also have factored in, though no one’s keeping tabs on them.
Online platforms have further expanded the trade. A 2022 study by Martin and his colleagues showed 83 species of African birds are sold online, and users from South Asia and the Middle East engaged the most with posts selling birds on Facebook.
Martin said those findings prompted further investigations into the bird trade in Bangladesh, which was importing several endangered species from across the globe. In 2024, CITES recommended that Bangladesh suspend the commercial trading of all CITES-listed birds internationally. The country responded by stopping the imports of all exotic birds.
‘Terrifying’ biodiversity and public health risks
With few regulations and little tracking of how many birds are bought and sold, the massive trade in wild birds is harming biodiversity in Africa. Birds are critical to the environment as they pollinate flowers, disperse seeds, control pests and rejuvenate landscapes.
Bruslund said field studies “are desperately lacking,” especially in West Africa. “With the observed volume of birds in the live bird trade … it is very plausible that many may be in real trouble.”
With most, if not all, traded birds pulled from the wild, Martin said there’s no data to determine if this level of trade is sustainable. “There are no reports of large-scale breeding facilities for these birds, and there’s really no economic incentive to develop this because they can be trapped much more easily in the wild.”
Millions of birds crammed into tiny spaces, transported and sold under stressful, often unhealthy conditions, can spread lethal diseases to captive and wild birds — and potentially, to humans.
The lethal circovirus, also known as Psittacine beak and feather disease, is of concern: The virus originated in Australia and has spread globally through trade. Psittacosis, another bacterial disease in parrots, can jump to humans and cause pneumonia. The deadly avian flu, which has spread across the globe, is another serious concern. Open-air bird markets are known to be hotspots for viruses.
“It’s the perfect conditions for the horizontal transfer of pathogens between different species,” Martin said. “The biosecurity risks are pretty terrifying.”
When non-native birds are released or escape, they can become invasive. For example, parrots in New Zealand and the parasitic pin-tailed whydah (Vidua macroura) in parts of the U.S., the Caribbean and Hawaii, brought in as pets, are outcompeting native birds. The brightly colored ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula krameri), brought to Europe as a pet, has caused massive declines in native wildlife.
The study authors suggest that exporting countries reconsider their trade policies and permit trade only if the benefits outweigh the risks to the environment and human health. Importing countries must tighten quarantine measures, restrict numbers and ensure the birds they allow in are legally acquired, the authors wrote.
“Many countries have moved away from trade in wild birds because of the potential risks and challenges of effective management,” Martin said.
However, setting up quarantine facilities requires money and trained staff to ensure that all isolation protocols are properly followed and there’s sufficient oversight. “That’s not a trivial thing,” Martin said. While these facilities will help, illegally trafficked birds will still pose a significant risk to animal and human health.
Reining in illicit trade is a complicated global challenge. Bruslund proposes registration and documentation of all wild animals kept in captivity. It “seems like the responsible thing to do,” he said. South Korea, Singapore and some EU countries are experimenting with a “positive list” of animals that can be kept as pets. It could make trade sustainable by permitting the sale of only captive-bred animals and those that don’t become invasive or pose health risks.
That “would allow for opportunities where these could actually contribute to conservation rather than the opposite,” Bruslund said.
Banner image: A yellow-fronted canary from South Africa. The songbird tops the list of wild birds exported from Africa to Asia. Image © tjeerd via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Spoorthy Raman is a staff writer at Mongabay, covering all things wild with a special focus on lesser-known wildlife, the wildlife trade, and environmental crime.
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Correction: CITES recommended Bangladesh suspend all CITES-listed bird import but it did not suspend the country from the convention. Nearly 65% of the 1,085,326 birds, excluding parrots, birds of prey and poultry, imported into Singapore and Hong Kong were from Africa, according to the report. This article was updated on April 20, 2026.
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