With bright, painted-looking feathers, colorful birds are often pretty, charismatic species that serve as billboards for conservation. Those same colors may also put them at greater risk of extinction in some parts of the world, according to a study published today in the journal Conservation biology.

a creepy 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 ornithologist at the University of California, Davis, spent hours in the jungles of Vietnam hoping to spot a rare bird with a spooky name. The collared laughing thrush (Trochalopteron yersini) or Halloween bird gets its name from its orange, silver and black color and distinctive, loud song. They are highly sought after in the pet trade due to this combination of fun colors and unique songs. They only have a range of 239 square miles and are considered Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

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

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

Some birds are known to be at higher risk of extinction, due to traits such as body mass or dietary preferences that make them more susceptible to human impacts on their environment, such as deforestation or urbanization. But could its color also influence it?

The extinction factor

For this study, Ocampo-Peñuela and Neate-Clegg dove into how traits that humans value in birds (such as their colors and sounds) can affect 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, titmice, sparrows, and swallows. Also called songbirds or perching birds, the shape of passerines’ legs 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 existing data on the birds’ coloration and other traits. These models are designed to unravel the relationship between color and extinction status.

One of his models examined color along with the birds’ diet, wing shape, body size and other traits. A separate model overlaid the birds’ geographic range on top of the first model exploring physical traits, to show how birds varied by region. A third model included 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.

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

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

People protect what they love.

One thing is clear: the pet trade alone does not increase the risk of extinction of colorful birds. More studies will be needed to identify all the factors at play, but the team suggests that predation, land use changes and climate change are all possible factors. The team hopes these results can inform future bird conservation practices.

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

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