Bird singing contests: Looking back on thirty years of research on a global conservation concern

Keeping wild birds is a deeply engrained and widely prevalent cultural practice, with a history going back thousands of years. One of the more recent trends to emerge from this practice is the singing contest, which pits male birds against each other to impress human judges with their songs, plumage, and movement. A champion bird can garner social prestige and, in some cases, considerable sums of prize money for its human owner. Today these contests drive demand in the global songbird trade, especially in Southeast Asia where more bird species are threatened by trade than in any other region of the world. This literature review aims to describe how we study the songbird trade and identify new research opportunities with a focus on singing contests. We aggregated 219 papers published between 1990 and 2020 and categorized them according to geographic origin, publication date, and academic focus. We found that singing contests currently take place in 19 countries across five of the world’s biogeographic regions, using at least 36 species of birds. Our analysis revealed that research on the songbird trade is most prevalent in the Indo-Malay, Neotropic, and Palearctic regions, tends to prioritize birds over humans, and corresponds with the prevalence of singing contests. Education and Outreach had the fewest publications of any discipline in our review, and we conclude this kind of research may provide a valuable basis for future conservation strategies targeting the songbird trade at a global scale.