The Harry Potter books and movies seem to have fuelled a dramatic rise in the number of owls being traded as pets in Indonesia, a new study concludes.
In the past, conservationists have suggested that the popularity of the fictional mail-delivering owls in the Harry Potter books may have caused an uptick in the illegal trade in owls in countries like India. Now, scientists believe that the “Harry Potter effect” may have done the same in Indonesia.
Birds have always been popular pets in Indonesia. But owls were rarely recorded in the country’s bird markets in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, Vincent Nijman and Anna Nekaris of Oxford Brookes University report in the study published in Global Ecology and Conservation. This trend appears to have changed in the late 2000s.
Surveys of 20 bird markets in Java and Bali conducted between 2012 and 2016 revealed that owls are now widely traded. At least 12,000 Scops owls (Otus spp) are being sold in Indonesia’s bird markets each year, the researchers estimated, in addition to a thousand other larger owls like the Australasian barn owl (Tyto javanica), the Oriental bay owl (Phodilus badius) and the Buffy fish owl (Bubo ketupu). In the Harry Potter films, Ron Weasley’s pet owl, nicknamed Pigwidgeon, is depicted as a common Scops owl…
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