By Jon Emont
SINGAPORE -- This skyscraper-studded financial and technology hub teems with digitally savvy residents. Some of the most notable tweets, though, are the old fashioned variety, made by an actual bird.
Over the past few years, Singapore has earned an unlikely reputation as an answer to what environmentalists call the Asian songbird crisis.
Across Southeast Asia, birds with stunning pipes command huge sums in the pet trade because of the popularity of bird-singing competitions. A particularly coveted performer is the straw-headed bulbul, which makes a long, bubbling melody and has been dubbed one of Asia's most charismatic songbirds.
The sandy-domed crooners have been trapped to near-extinction across neighboring countries. Thanks to its strict antipoaching laws, densely developed Singapore has become a place where the birds can warble in peace.
Between 600 and 1,700 mature straw-headed bulbuls remain around the world, and an estimated 200 to 500 of them live and chirp in Singapore.
There is an official Straw-headed Bulbul Working Group, a sign of this bureaucratic city's passion for the bird. Residents share reports of bulbul sightings on social media. Schoolchildren receive an activity book featuring Sam the straw-headed bulbul and her friend Ben the banded bullfrog attempting to win the "Battle of the Bands." (Spoiler alert: They do, thanks in part to bandmate Grace, a greater racket-tailed drongo, who mimics Sam's vocals to great effect.)
Ding Li Yong, a Singaporean conservationist whose work with fellow researchers helped establish Singapore's prominence as a bulbul sanctuary, says when colleagues from heavily forested neighbors visit, they insist on seeing the birds that have all but disappeared in their own countries.
By contrast, he says, "there are places in Singapore where you can hear several of them calling just from one spot."
Recently, Mr. Yong hosted a bird-watcher from Thailand: "I asked him 'What's the first priority for you, what's the first thing you want to see?' And he said, 'Bring me to the bulbuls!' "
They spotted three.
The attention on the bulbul comes as Singapore's government has become concerned about the effect of decades of soaring economic growth on land and nature. In the nation of nearly six million people, all the farmland combined adds up to a couple square miles. Industrial buildings are being converted into vertical farms with climate-controlled grow rooms. Officials are also focused on boosting wildlife, and aspire to create a lush "City in Nature," filled with greenery and creatures.
In the 2000s, officials worked with local conservationists to boost the tiny population of the oriental-pied hornbill, a big-beaked bird whose females seal themselves into tree holes to lay and incubate eggs. An obstacle in Singapore? A shortage of tree holes. The government-backed Singapore Hornbill Project built artificial nesting boxes to encourage breeding.
Experts believe the straw-headed bulbul is extinct in Thailand and Myanmar. Its numbers have declined sharply in Malaysia and Indonesia.
In competitions across Southeast Asia, trained caged birds draw huge crowds. In Indonesia, successful songbirds can sell for thousands of dollars, driving up demand for species such as the bulbul, which are known to sing duets with their lovers.
In 2018, Indonesian President Joko Widodo entered his white-rumped shama into a national bird-singing competition -- a contingent of straw-headed bulbuls also participated -- and lost. He offered to buy the winner's bird but was turned down, according to Indonesia's palace.
Later that year, Indonesia's government added the straw-headed bulbul to its list of protected species that can't be hunted or captured. The move received such backlash the government struck the bird from the list.
In Singapore local groups convened the Straw-headed Bulbul Conservation Planning Workshop in 2019. Two years later, the government and conservationists established the Straw-headed Bulbul Working Group.
The SHBWG closely tracks bulbul numbers. It is analyzing the results of a 2021 population survey to better understand how straw-headed bulbuls interact with other bulbul species, according to Singapore's National Parks Board, which plans to incorporate the findings into what it calls a Species Action Plan. The board says it is also reforesting bulbul strongholds, such as Pulau Ubin, a Singapore island a short bird flight from the mainland.
"I think this is the biggest, most coordinated local effort for any single species apart from the Singapore crab," says Movin Nyanasengeran, a member of the working group and a Ph.D. student at the National University of Singapore's Avian Evolution Lab, which in a milestone, succeeded in generating the straw-headed bulbul genome around a year ago. (The Singapore freshwater crab is also critically endangered.)
Desmond Lee, Singapore's national-development minister, has called bulbul conservation "a remarkable achievement for us as a small city-state." For a long time, though, Mr. Lee, a self-described "novice bird-watcher," struggled to spot them. "It is an elusive bird. It still eludes me even today," he lamented in 2020 at a national bird-spotting competition.
Three months later, a video clip appeared on his Facebook page with bird song wafting from the treetops. A Facebook user asked if Mr. Lee had seen the bird. "Yes, finally!" Mr. Lee replied.
Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 20, 2023 10:35 ET (15:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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