Songbirds such as canaries were among the most popular wild imports
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Over the past two decades, nearly 3 billion plants and animals have been imported into the US, most of them from the wild.
“The numbers are absolutely huge,” he says Alice Hughes at the University of Hong Kong. That estimate still falls short, he says, because it only includes legal exchanges, and there is no comprehensive way to track the entire global wildlife trade. “We’re just scratching the surface,” he says.
