Cheng Kang, Caged Life (DOCO 2024)

Indonesia has a long history and deeply ingrained culture of the trading and keeping of caged birds. Across the country, tens of millions of songbirds are traded each year to meet the immense local demand, driven by the 140 million residents on the island of Java. Across Indonesia, the songbird trade generates over $US78million. It serves as the livelihoods of many families particularly in the more rural and impoverished parts of the country such as Lombok where these images were taken. For the owners, they are a symbolism of wealth and beauty as each family strives to obtain a bird with the best vocals. These unstainable practices have been shown to threaten native bird species and dramatically reduce their numbers in the wild. As custodians of the land and environment which humans share, we are presented with a difficult dilemma of balancing a family’s livelihood driven by local demand, with the health and biodiversity of the natural habitat.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.