Few years ago, I´ve wandered around Athens and entered a pet shop. It had dozens of cages - smaller then these, but each filled with 30-50 birds. Some were common ones like budgerigars or zebra finches, but most were wild european singing birds. There were not enough perches so most of them just sat on the cage ground or were hanging on mesh. They could just dream about clean water.
Compared to that Greek pet shop, these chinese trader seem to realy take care of his birds.
I did go to the Bird Market which was a few streets away from my hostel. The first sellers I passed mostly had lots of canaries and budgies, a few Bengalese and some Gouldian finches, with just one having wild-caught birds (a cage packed with yellow-bellied tits). As I got deeper into the alleys the wild birds started appearing, with cages crammed full of Mongolian larks, Siberian rubythroats, redstarts, Pekin robins, yellow-bellied tits, white-eyes and, surprisingly, tree sparrows. Those were all in big numbers; in lesser numbers were bluethroats, hill mynahs, hawfinches (including some dyed ones), niltavas, red-tailed minlas, elegant buntings, crested tits, hwameis, Chinese bulbuls, blackbirds, skylarks, a few spot-necked doves,a couple of azure-winged magpies and just one red-billed blue magpie. The mammal section was almost non-existent, mostly rabbits and guinea pigs except for one red squirrel and some cages full of little piles of Siberian chipmunks. The aquatic section was interesting too, mostly lots of goldfish in polystyrene tubs and hundreds of baby and adult turtles. There were tubs filled inches deep with baby red-eared sliders, poured in as if they were grain. I'm not good at turtle identification but there were quite a few species represented in the market, including softshells, baby snapping turtles (?) and Cuora species. Then there were the tubs of water filled with tiny albino clawed frogs (Xenopus) dyed bright flourescent blue, yellow, green and pink.
It may be noted that I completely forgot to include silver-eared mesias in that list of birds (and probably some others as well). In the photo above, the birds in the cage to the left of the mesias are red-tailed minlas, and the ones to the left of them were mynahs. Niltavas at the back right; I don't know what the bluey-greeny ones next to them were (I was going to look them up but never got round to it; something like verditer flycatchers or similar I expect). There are a couple of yellow-cheeked tits as well, right up the back.
I was worried about that because I've had trouble before in animal markets when taking photos, so I didn't take any of most of the birds (just two photos). But once I started taking photos of the aquatic stuff, squirrels, etc I realised nobody cared and there's no reason they should because they're not doing anything illegal. I was careful what I framed in the camera though because this apparently doubled as the **** Market!! (Which was a bit of a surprise given how China likes censoring everything).
I was worried about that because I've had trouble before in animal markets when taking photos, so I didn't take any of most of the birds (just two photos). But once I started taking photos of the aquatic stuff, squirrels, etc I realised nobody cared and there's no reason they should because they're not doing anything illegal. I was careful what I framed in the camera though because this apparently doubled as the **** Market!! (Which was a bit of a surprise given how China likes censoring everything).
