For Birds, Beauty Can Be a Curse

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BBirds are some of the most breathtaking animals on Earth. Consider the peacock, with its attractive train of iridescent tail feathers. Or the paradise tanager, a small songbird native to the Amazon rainforest that almost seems to have flown through a rainbow and whose colors have remained true.

But beauty can turn into a curse, as the old adage goes, and that cosmic joke seems to extend to birds: It turns out that beautiful poultry is also trafficked more frequently in international markets, according to a recent study published in Biological conservation.

The researchers held a beauty contest of sorts, posting photographs online of more than 9,000 birds, from every order of living birds, and then asking people to rate the birds’ visual appeal on a scale of 1 to 10. They ultimately collected more than 400,000 responses, from 78 countries, and calculated average scores. (The snowy owl, for example, scored 8.03; the meadow pipit, a more modest 4.6.) They then compared these scores with data on legal and illegal bird trade from five databases, controlling for bird body mass and range size, which had also previously been shown to influence bird trade.

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“Our results highlight a troubling pattern: people’s preference for visual beauty may unintentionally increase the conservation risks of some species,” lead author Anna Haukka, a researcher at the Helsinki Ornithology Laboratory and the Finnish Natural History Museum, said in a statement. “Parrots, colorful songbirds and birds of prey, often considered particularly beautiful, are disproportionately represented in trade, sometimes at unsustainable levels. »

For some beautiful birds, trade has reached such dizzying heights that they are threatened with extinction. 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 commerce.

As the researchers suspected, the higher the beauty of a bird, the more likely it was to end up at live bird auctions, both in international and domestic markets, which are primarily linked to the pet trade. Aesthetic beauty also played an important role in domestic markets for feathers or clothing made from bird parts, but less so in the medicine or meat trade. Species with a wider range and larger body size were more likely to end up in international bird markets, as previously shown, while species with smaller body sizes were more susceptible to domestic trade.

Birds aren’t the only ones who suffer from appearances. Visual appeal also drives trade in other international animal markets: studies suggest that color, patterns, size, and features such as the hairiness of spiders or the unusual growth patterns of orchids make it more likely that humans will attempt to turn that beauty into profit.

It was already clear from previous studies that the color of a bird or the uniqueness of its coat colors could influence the trafficking of the species. But the authors of the current research felt that this focus on color neglected other elements of birds’ visual appeal that buyers and sellers might pay attention to, such as particularly long tails, crests or body size. Some species with softer colors, such as hawks, are considered particularly beautiful, for example.

Hopefully, their work will help conservationists spot the most vulnerable birds in the beauty trap before it’s too late.

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Main image: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on November 13, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.