The Silent Forest - Part One
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2017
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It is Saturday morning in Pontianak in West Kalimantan in Indonesia, at a songbird competition. In every district across Indonesia you will find these, large and small. This passion for birdsong has swept the country since it was encouraged in the 1970s, by a government keen to build a new leisure activity for Indonesians. But what was once a solitary and poetic pastime, having a songbird in your house or garden, has become an industry in which real money can be made by training a winning bird. It is one of the biggest threats to Indonesia’s forests which have gradually fallen silent as millions of birds every year are trapped and sold illegally. Can the forest survive without birds?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello from the BBC World Service and welcome to the latest edition of the documentary |
| 0:05.5 | podcast. Every week we bring you a range of stories from our presenters and reporters |
| 0:11.0 | across the world. If you have the time please rate the documentary |
| 0:15.2 | on your podcast app and leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. |
| 0:20.1 | I'm standing in the middle of a group of young men with bird cages that can only be described as bling. |
| 0:30.0 | The cages are |
| 0:35.0 | expensive |
| 0:36.0 | expensive cages is like mostly decorated |
| 0:40.0 | and very detailed carved |
| 0:42.0 | and in very fine materials wooden and then it's very heavy and then it's very heavy and then it |
| 0:49.0 | can cost about like 500 years or something. |
| 0:54.4 | Giving the image for the owner that they have that |
| 0:57.7 | prestige. |
| 0:59.2 | It's about prestige. |
| 1:00.4 | Prestise, you know. Hello, I'm Gretchen Miller from the ABC and with Neil Trevithic from BBC World Service. |
| 1:08.6 | We're beginning a journey through silent forests, taking us from Indonesia to Vietnam and from Thailand |
| 1:16.2 | across to Myanmar to talk with local people working with animals and trees which are literally |
| 1:22.4 | being exploited to death and we're |
| 1:25.1 | starting here at a songbird competition. |
| 1:28.3 | Morning my name is Sutresno. I'm a leader. |
| 1:34.0 | So he's the leader for the judges for both competitions in West Carolina. |
| 1:38.0 | Oh, okay. |
... |
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