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Birds are some of the most visually stunning animals on Earth. Consider the peacock, with its eye-fetching train of iridescent tail feathers. Or the paradise tanager, a small songbird native to the Amazon rainforest that looks almost as though it flew through a rainbow and the colors stuck.
But beauty can turn into a curse, as the old saying goes, and this cosmic joke seems to extend to birds: Good looking fowl, it turns out, are also more frequently trafficked in international markets, according to a recent study published in Biological Conservation.
The researchers staged a beauty pageant of sorts, posting photographs online of more than 9,000 birds, from each living bird order, and then asking people to rate the birds’ visual appeal on a scale of 1 to 10. They ultimately collected over 400,000 responses—across 78 countries—and calculated average scores. (The snowy owl, for example, scored 8.03; the humbler meadow pipit a more modest 4.6.) They then matched these scores against data on legal and illegal bird trade from five databases, controlling for body mass and range size of the birds, which had also previously been shown to influence bird trade.
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“Our findings highlight a troubling pattern: People’s preference for visual beauty may unintentionally increase conservation risks for certain species,” said lead author Anna Haukka, a researcher at the Helsinki Lab of Ornithology and the Finnish Museum of Natural History, in a statement. “Parrots, colourful songbirds, and birds of prey that are often considered especially beautiful, are disproportionately represented in trade, sometimes at unsustainable levels.”
For some beautiful birds, trade has reached such dizzying heights that the birds are threatened with extinction risk. This includes some Southeast Asian songbirds such as the orange-headed thrush Zoothera citrina, and the white-rumped shama Copsychus malabaricus, which are heavily targeted by trade.
As the researchers suspected, the higher the bird’s beauty ranking, the more likely it was to find itself on the live bird auction block, both in international and domestic markets, which are mostly related to the pet trade. Aesthetic beauty also played an important part in domestic markets for feathers or clothing made from bird parts, but less so in medicine or meat-related trades. Species with wider ranges and larger body sizes were more likely to end up in international bird markets, as had previously been shown, while species with smaller body size were more susceptible to domestic trade.
Birds aren’t the only ones who suffer for appearances. Visual appeal also dictates trade in other international animal markets: Studies suggest that colorfulness, patterns, size, and traits such as hairiness in spiders or unusual growth patterns in orchids make it more likely that humans will try to turn that beauty into profit.
It was already clear from earlier studies that a bird’s colorfulness or the uniqueness of colors in its coat could influence trafficking in the species. But the authors of the current research felt this focus on color missed other elements of birds’ visual appeal that buyers and sellers might pay attention to, such as especially long tails, crests, or body size. Some species that feature more muted colors, such as falcons, are considered especially beautiful, for instance.
With luck, their work will help conservationists spot the birds that are most vulnerable to the beauty trap before it’s too late. 
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Lead image: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock
