Our guest speaker Made (John) Arnaya talked about his birds. He raises three kinds of birds with the intention of helping to increase the population of the birds and he also trains song birds.

There are a group of local people who deal in birds and they meet weekly to have local competitions and also share information on how to care for birds. (John is an associate of Made Taka who was interviewed in the March 2010 issue of The Lovina Pages.)

Only male birds sing and he starts training them when they are about 3 months old.

John, who is now 32, has noticed that some bird types that were common in North Bali when he was young are now harder to find. He thinks this is mainly because of people hunting them, but it is also because some of the trees have gone. Breeding these birds in captivity is one way to help, and maybe they can eventually release some back to the wild.

In the past people in Bali who raised and trained song-birds could take them to competitions in Java - but Bird Flu has changed that. So far there have not been Bird Flu outnreaks in North Bali, but still the government has introduced regulations to prevent birds being transported between islands - so the only competitions they can enter are local.

When John first started breeding the birds he could not tell by looking which ones would be good song-birds - but now with experience he can pick the birds that are likely to have potential as singers. Things to observer are the shape of the head, the beak and the neck.

When the male birds are 3 months old they are ready for training to sing. They mimic what they can hear and this helps their development, so it is useful to keep other types of birds so that they will hear various songs that they can then mimic.

In the competitions, the attributes that help make a winner include

• how many different tunes a bird can sing

• how long the bird will keep singing
• the ability to keep singing in the noisy environments of the competition venue