Who Would Have Thought,

that the Harry Potter books could have an impact on owls?

but they have, the books are filled with owls, from Harry’s BFF Hedwig to Draco Malfoy’s mail-delivering eagle owl, but those fictional owls could be linked with a black market in the real world, in Indonesia, researchers believe that the popularity of the Harry Potter franchise is leading to a significant upturn in black-market owl trading, Nature reports, 

 

a new study in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation examined the number of owl sales in 20 bird markets on the Indonesian islands of Bali and Java, where wild-caught birds are sold as pets, in the early 2000s, owls were rare in these markets, owls made up less than 0.06 percent of the birds in Indonesian bird markets before 2002, but after 2008, they were 0.43 percent of the market, while there could be other reasons for the increase in demand for owls as pets, such as greater internet access allowing people to trade info on where to get the birds, the world’s most famous boy wizard surely shares some of the blame, look no further than the birds' popular name: "Harry Potter birds." they used to be known as "ghost birds," the researchers write, strangely enough in the UK it is perfectly legal to keep a native owl as a pet.