Colourful songbirds could be traded to extinction

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Image caption, Caged birds are sold in their thousands in markets like this one in Jakarta The study, published in the journal Current Biology, also showed that if the most desirable birds continued to be taken from the wild, the populations left in Asia's tropical forests would gradually become "more drab".
"And there are particular categories of colour that tend to be more common in the trade - azure (sometimes described as sky blue) and yellow.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) set up a specialist group in an effort to prevent the extinction of species that are threatened by the trade.
"Rather than go in all guns blazing and say, 'you can't take these birds that have been an important part of your culture for so long'," said Prof Senior, "we could identify the species that are at risk and try to shift the sourcing to captive-bred birds.