Jolie, an Indochinese green magpie, was rescued from a wildlife trafficker’s suitcase. Her story is emblematic of the threats facing other songbirds like her.
Jolie the Indochinese green magpie is one lucky bird. Six years after being rescued from the illegal wildlife trade, the brilliantly hued animal is now a star of National Geographic’s Photo Ark.
The project, led by National Geographic Explorer and photographer Joel Sartore, aims to document 20,000 species living in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries around the world to bring attention to endangered species and their threats. Jolie is the 14,000th addition to the ark; the 13,000th milestone species, announced in July 2022, was the spoon-billed sandpiper. (Read why Sartore founded Photo Ark.)
Since its founding in 2006, Photo Ark has been featured in multiple national news outlets and books, as well as inspired a conservation fellowship program in conjunction with the Zoological Society of London called the National Geographic Photo Ark EDGE Fellows. The project will get another boost of public awareness on May 19, Endangered Species Day, when the U.S. Postal Service will release stamps of animals featured in the Photo Ark to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.
Jolie is “very emblematic of one of the main problems in Southeast Asia, which is wildlife trafficking,” Sartore says. “The demand for birds is high, and it’s leading to what we call silent forests. Her story is amazing and heartbreaking, and sadly not uncommon.”
In 2017, officials recovered 93 Asian songbirds from a smuggler’s suitcase at Los Angeles International Airport, and Jolie is one of only eight that survived. She now lives at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens.
In Southeast Asia in 2022, at least 37,000 songbirds were confiscated from the wild, with the most birds taken from Indonesia, according to TRAFFIC, a nonprofit working to combat illegal trade. People who buy the animals keep them as pets or enter them into singing competitions that are popular in some Asian cultures. As a result, Indochinese green magpies are in decline across their range in mainland Southeast Asia and China, though they are not endangered. (Read how the black-market trade in wildlife has moved online.)
Nicholas Friedman, curator of ornithology at the Museum of Nature Hamburg in Germany, notes that birds in the genus Cissa, like Jolie, are among the most vividly plumed—and coveted—members of the family Corvidae, which most people in Europe and North America know best as black crows and ravens.
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