The street where I’m staying would generally be a turn-off to me, studded with guesthouses and restaurants, but since it’s nothing like Ubud, I can live with it. It’s also quite close to the train station, which is really nice since I’m taking an overnight train to Bandung tonight for a relatively full and diverse weekend with a group of Indonesian photographers. Should be quite interesting for me.
One of the reasons that I came to Yogya is that I’m photographing another radio station this afternoon. It’s the second of three that I’ll be visiting for one of my clients, and we set up a 3PM visit for this afternoon. So I had a long morning to do a self-guided walking tour of the city, checking out some of the history, commerce, and local character. One of the last places that I went to was the bird market, one of the stops that I was actually most excited about. It started off tame enough with the crickets and mealworms, and other grains to feed your birds. But then it got dicey fast with cage after cage of far too many birds in too small spaces. One thing that was most sad was seeing a whole section of tropical birds that I’m sure were caught in places like I visited in Kalimantan. It’s places like this where they end up being sold, and from there it can’t be a very happy life. But what was most horrifying was stumbling across the nocturnal creatures for sale in tiny cages in the middle of this hot market. First were the terrified bats—who buys those?—and then a handful of owls. The owl that really caught my eye was a mature adult who could not even open up his or her wings the cage was so small. The sun was beating down on it. Absolutely no place for an owl to be.
Last night, I watched The Cove, the wonderfully made but horrific documentary about dolphin and porpoise slaughtering in Japan. I pondered how if I had it in me to just start smashing all of the cages and setting the birds free. And then I wondered how many of these animals could now live on their own, many having been taken as babies and now far, far away from their homes. After seeing The Cove, doing nothing was not an option, and taking a few photos here and there to share with friends back home was absolutely insufficient. So I asked what the asking price was for the adult owl, and was told 100,000 rupiah, or about $11. The smaller adolescent owls were twice that amount, and while I would have liked to have bought all of them, they didn’t seem to have it quite as bad as this big one. So of course I bargained, which is totally ridiculous when a life is at stake and it’s only $11, but it pained me to have these people making excessive profits off of such cruelty. It didn’t work, and I knew I was going to buy it at any price, so 100,000 it was. They then said if I wanted the cage, it would be 30,000 extra (much of this through sign-language since I didn’t speak their language nor they mine). When I told them that I didn’t want the cage, the saleswoman went looking for something, presumably a rope or a cloth bag, and I gestured to another man that I wanted to set it free, throwing my arms into the air and waving them profusely. That seemed to translate, and soon enough the lady was back and taking the owl out of the cage. The owl starting screaming when she tried to grab it and I was concerned about its wings as she wrestled to take it out through the door that was only about 3 x 4 inches big. But it made it and soon it was in the arms of the man who I had spoken to about setting it free. He gestured to me a few more times, ‘are you sure you want me to let this bird fly away?’ and I nodded yes. And then he threw it into the air and it quickly flew away to the applause of all of the shopkeepers who had gathered. Perhaps the best $11 that I’ve ever spent, or at least it felt like it at that moment.
This all was done without much thought and I’ll be interested to hear comments and think about this more myself. But for the moment, here are some crappy photographs from the great escape:
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