Colorful songbirds face higher risk of extinction

With bright feathers that look painted on, colorful birds are typically pretty and charismatic poster species for conservation. Those same colors can also put them at a higher risk for extinction in some parts of the world, according to a study published today in the journal Conservation Biology.

A spooky bird

Last year, study co-author Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, an ornithologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Monte Neate-Clegg, a study co-author and University of California, Davis ornithologist, spent hours in the jungles of Vietnam waiting to spot a rare bird with a spooky name. The collared laughingthrush (Trochalopteron yersini) or Halloween bird gets its name from its orange, silver, and black coloring and a distinct, singsong call. They are heavily sought after for the pet trade due to this combination of fun colors and unique songs. They only have a range of 239 square miles and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers them Endangered.

“Our guide had a secret hide deep in the forest where it was possible to view this specialty, and so we sat patiently for several hours waiting for one to appear,” Ocampo-Peñuela and Neate-Clegg tell Popular Science. “We had almost given up hope when a pair appeared and frolicked on a log in front of us. It was a captivating experience!”

A collared laughingthrush in Da lat, Vietnam. Image: feathercollector via Getty Images.

During this expedition, Ocampo-Peñuela and Neate-Clegg thought about how much the Halloween bird is sought-after by birdwatchers and the pet trade at the same time. Both are also avid birdwatchers who have noticed the decline of colorful songbirds in Southeast Asia, and were curious if there was any connection between colorfulness and extinction risk.

Some birds are known to have a higher extinction risk, due to traits such as body mass or dietary preferences that make them more susceptible to human impacts to their environment, such as deforestation or urbanization. But could their coloration also play a role?

The extinction factor

For this study, Ocampo-Peñuela and Neate-Clegg dove into how traits that humans value in birds (like their colors and sounds) may impact their risk of extinction. They focused on passerine birds, the largest and most diverse group of birds. Passerine birds make up more than half of Earth’s known bird species and include crows, chickadees, sparrows, and swallows. Also called songbirds or perching birds, passerine birds’ foot shape allows them to perch on small branches. This adaptation means that they can live in a wide range of microhabitats.

The team created computer models that mapped out the existing data on bird coloration and other traits. These models are designed to disentangle the relationship between color and extinction status.

One of their models examined color alongside diet, wing shape, body size, and other bird traits. A separate model layered the birds’ geographical range on top of the first model that explored physical traits, to show how the birds varied by region. A third model wove in data on human economic factors and a fourth model included data from the Songbirds in Trade database to show the relationship between color and bird trade.

The IUCN considers Halloween birds endangered. Image: feathercollector via Getty Images.

Their models showed that more colorful birds are at higher risk. This correlation is also stronger in more temperate regions than tropics, and in countries with fewer human impacts on the environment. However, differences do pop up along geographic and cultural lines. According to the team, this indicates that birds are not threatened for the same reasons everywhere. While the pet trade is a part of the problem for songbirds in Southeast Asia, habitat loss and climate change likely play a bigger role in Africa and Latin America.

“One thing we found in our study was that the positive relationship between extinction risk and colorfulness existed even for the thousands of bird species that were not known to be traded,” Ocampo-Peñuela and Neate-Clegg say. “This pattern is much harder to explain: what else about being colorful heightens a species’ threat status? Could it be that more colorful birds struggle to stay cool in a warming climate? Or that their conspicuousness puts them at a higher risk of predation? We’re really not sure!”

People protect what they love

One thing is clear, the pet trade alone does not raise extinction risk for colorful birds. It will take more studies to identify all of the factors at play, but the team suggests that predation, land-use shifts, and climate change are all possible factors. The team hopes that these results can inform future bird conservation practices.

“People tend to care more about and rally around these colorful birds, which is what makes them really good flagship species for conservation,” Neate-Clegg said. “However, if we lose the most colorful ones, we lose the ones that people care about the most, and the ones which are doing the heaviest lifting for conservation. We want people to capture the beauty of these birds through a camera lens or pair of binoculars, not in a cage.”

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