The silent forest: songbirds

A four part series for BBC World Service and ABC RN. It’s Saturday morning in Pontianak in West Kalimantan in Indonesia, at a songbird competition. In every district across Indonesia you’ll find these, large and small. Here, there are sixty cages hung up above head height under the corrugated metal ceiling of an open-sided building. It's hot here, right on the equator, and over a 100 young men are cheering and shouting, focused, on their birds, and on winning. It sounds like a boxing match with added birds singing at the tops of their voices.    This passion for birdsong has swept the country since it was encouraged in the 1970s by a government keen to build a new leisure activity for Indonesians. No one could have predicted how out of hand it could get. What was once a solitary and poetic pastime, having a songbird in your house or garden, has become an industry in which real money can be made by training a winning bird.   It’s known here as chirping mania and is one of the biggest threats to Indonesia’s forests which have gradually fallen silent as millions of birds every year are trapped and sold illegally. Can the forest survive without birds? Guests: Novia Sagita and Adam Miller, co-directors at Planet Indonesia Jonathan Beilby, Ade Imansyah, and Arfah Nasution, working at Cikananga Conservation Breeding Centre