Poisonous pitohuis as pets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Poisonous birds are rare but on New Guinea, including Indonesia’s easternmost provinces, no less than nine poisonous species, eight pitohuis and one species of ifrita, are found. Pitohuis when handled can cause sneezing with numbness and burning of nasal tissue and nausea in humans. In the bird markets of western Indonesia novelty birds are traded at a premium and overexploitation of popular songbirds leads traders to find replacement species to meet demand. We conducted over 800 surveys in the bird markets of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, and Sulawesi between 1994 and 2023 and from 2015 onwards we assessed the online trade in pitohuis and Blue-capped Ifrit Ifrita kowaldi. We identified the species, recorded their prices and location, and the date when the birds were offered for sale. We analysed temporal trends, volumes, prices, and geographical origin of the sellers. Between 1994 and 2014 we did not encounter a single pitohui in the Indonesian bird markets. In the following years we recorded 113 pitohuis in 12 bird markets and we recorded 199 pitohuis for sale online; 248 were variable pitohuis and 54 were Hooded Pitohui Pitohui dichrous. No ifritas were recorded. Most pitohuis were recorded in eastern Java and Bali. Prices differed between eastern Java (mean of US$93) and western Java and Bali (US$185), possibly suggesting pitohuis arrive from West Papua in eastern Java and from there make their way to the outer markets. Pitohuis are marketed as “Papuan Straw-headed Bulbuls”; the Straw-headed Bulbul Pycnonotus zeylanicus is a very popular and expensive songbird from Southeast Asia, including western Indonesia, that has become rare both in the wild and in the markets due to overexploitation. Discussions about pitohuis on online forums rarely mention “poisonous” but when it is mentioned traders dismiss this as something not to worry about and they claim it to be dietary-dependent. Poisonous pitohuis are novelty, as well as master, birds in Indonesia, where they are marketed for their song ignoring any negative side-effects of them being poisonous. The trade in novelty species, when detected early, does allow for the authorities to intervene in a timely manner to ensure that this trade does not impede their conservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".