this week, we're on the hunt for the parrot pirates. you've missed a bit! how to spot when buildings go wrong. and the musicians taking on the streaming scrooge. here we go again! this week, lara is doing something unusual. she has left the city to join someone special on a walk. she is in the new forest national park with wildlife tv legend chris packham. what a beautiful scene. tell me about this area.

well, we're in the new forest national park here, which is famous for various habitats, its valley moors, its sandy lowland heath, but also, its ancient woodland, and there are a number of veteran trees here, a significant number, so we're talking about trees that are five, six, 6.5, maybe even 700 years old and because there's been woodland here for that amount of time, it means that it supports a lot of other life — there's a great richness of biodiversity. the bird fauna here is really important too — we've got a number of national rarities. you can hear the birds — this is not a sound i'm used to, living in the city! no, what have we got? hold on... we've got a bit of robin going. a blue tit. yeah, there's blue tits and great tits calling. i mean, it's a lovely, sunny, pre—spring day.

they're loving the sunshine and they're pumping out some song. but, unfortunately, not all birds are left alone in their natural habitats and wildlife trafficking, mainly perpetrated online, is having a major impact on the world's biodiversity crisis. carl miller has been looking at the problem. we've had catastrophic declines of whole suites of bird communities. with our large tracts of forest, they're silent — they're silent forests, because the birds have been trapped out of these environments. so trapped out, in fact, that 40% of all bird populations in the world are now in decline. to find out a bit more, i came to london zoo, where some of these species have found a home. we have our blue—crowned laughing thrushes, you know, which are a species from china. there's less than 250 of those birds left in the wild and we actually have more in captivity.

the species is more threatened than the giant panda because of the trapping for the pet trade. the illegal pet trade is a major factor in declining bird numbers. what may come as a surprise to many is that most endangered of all groups of birds are parrots. what would be less surprising, though, is that the pet trade is a majorfactor in their decline. einstein could sure fit the bill because she loves to dance. can you get down? laughter. let's get down for everybody. come on now. she's gonna make me do it, too. imitates dance music. bird imitates dance music. this is an african grey parrot, famous for its intelligence and the most popular one to be kept as pets. even though many are bought in legitimate ways, their popularity fuels the illegal trade, too. these birds have been almost wiped out in some of their native countries so,

five years ago, they were given the highest category of international protection. it means all international trade of any wild african grey became illegal and there were serious restrictions on any transaction involving captive—bred birds as well. in short, it became illegal to capture and sell african greys. so, we went undercover to investigate how online trafficking still carries on under the radar, particularly on social media. we followed one of these ads which took us to bangladesh — one of the major hubs in southeast asia for the trafficking of african greys. we set up a meeting with faiz ahmed, a trader whose social media led us to investigate possible illegal activity alongside his legitimate business. we operated under the pretext of wanting to start a breeding farm.

the conversation started over legal captive—bred parrots but faiz was also prepared to sell us wild african greys. he was confident that he would be able to get around customs import restrictions, and also advised it would be a lucrative business. recently, a global initiative was set up to understand the scale of the problem and a new system was designed to give conservationists a data—driven view of possible illegal trades online. no—one is able to give us an authoritative answer to how much of this is online and everywhere that it is occurring — it is too

dynamic, the online space is too fragmented. the system's mission is to identify online trading hot spots in the hope of disrupting a business that's worth £15 billion a year. although many online sites have worked to remove illicit content, the system has found around 10,000 classified ads all over the world for the sale of potentially endangered species and their parts. we showed our film to rowan martin of the world parrot trust, whose expertise in parrots and trafficking is helping the project's researchers. so, rowan, that was obviously undercover filming that colleagues of ours did in bangladesh. what do you think of all that? a lot of those would be endangered species but it might not necessarily be illegal trade. the conversation switches from this sort of legal side of things to more grey areas, where he is offering up or explaining how he can import large wholesale quantities of wild—caught african grey

parrots into bangladesh. and that would be illegal under international law? yeah, that would be illegal under international law. back in bangladesh, faiz was getting cold feet. he told us the authorities were getting stricter, so the birds could still be imported but he could not take responsibility for them at airport customs. when later called up by the film's producer

in the uk, faiz at first denied offering to trade african greys, and then claimed he did not know that their import was now illegal. our reporter contracted other sellers based in africa and asia and secured promises of shipments via transit countries. but for every one of these traders who we have highlighted, there are countless others using tricks online to avoid detection. they use clever things like sharing memories of something that maybe happened back when it was legal, but that might then stimulate a discussion amongst traders about whether or not something was still available. so they might not have been directly advertising, butjust indicating that these things are available. or, more specifically, school people within these groups about how to talk about the trade without it being flagged. this is all made worse by the way in which social media allows pockets of communities to form, who actively evade any enforcement efforts that do exist. they are using, sort of, new private channels which might only be viewable to friends and only available for a short period. these platforms aren'tjust, sort of, passively hosting a problem, they're actually acting to amplify that problem. that's where the system is aiming to outwit illegal sellers by figuring out the tactics being used in specific markets. on these indonesian posts, for example, it's cracked a code of letters and numbers used by sellers to represent

the asking price for each bird. and, in other cases, it's found a slang familiar to enthusiasts which may be used in possible sales, such asjitot for a bird which is fully tamed and raw for those that are wild and in plentiful numbers. we showed some of the posts selling endangered birds to the platforms hosting them, pointing out that in many cases, their existence was breaking their own site guidelines and policies. of those that responded, meta, the umbrella company of facebook and instagram, said... people are not going to huge lengths to hide behind tor browsers and on the dark web, because they don't need to. and i have seen it for myself with these birds that often get mutilated. they are crammed in these really crowded boxes, dying of dehydration. it is a slow, painful,

miserable death for a lot of these birds. lara: back in the new forest, i asked chris about the wider impact of the illegal wildlife trade. we are in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis which is really, really seriously impacting on our lives — even if we haven't felt here in uk yet — so stamping out illegal wildlife crime is absolutely critical. the principal culprits here for me are not those poachers — sometimes people living in poverty that cannot do anything but capture birds in the forest to feed their family — and tackling that part of the crime will be extraordinarily difficult. the easier part would be dealing with those platforms. they have the technological capacity to stop this, i believe, overnight, if there was a will. what do you feel that conservationists could do to help with this cause? frankly, i cannot write code. i don't understand algorithms. i understand birds and birdsong. but in order to protect those birds and that birdsong,

i need young, smart people with their fingers on the buttons of that technological capability to act in our interest. i mean, frankly, if i had my finger in the conservation purse at the moment, i would spend a lot more money on buying more nature reserves, so on and so forth. i'd spend certainly a significant sum on tackling these tech—led issues because we are underestimating how much damage they are doing and we've got to change that. hello, it's time for your 90—second tech news round—up. it was the week india announced its intention to launch a digital rupee this year. china is already publicly trialling its digital yuan. facebook�*s crypto project diem, once called libra, has officially been laid to rest. and sony announced it will buy video game developer bungie, famous for series like halo and destiny, in a deal worth $3.6 billion. spotify will add content advisory warnings to podcasts containing discussions about covid—i9. it's in response to concerns over spreading misinformation. veteran artists neil young

and joni mitchell wanted their music removed as the platform also hosts the controversial joe rogan podcast. the aviation fan who built a bot tweeting elon musk�*s flight plans has rewritten it to support other rich people's personal planes. flight plans that aren't sensitive are pubicly available, but elon dmed jack sweeney to offer him $5,000 to stop, citing security concerns. the 19—year—old said he was holding out for $50,000, but would also delete the @elonjet account in exchange for a tesla internship. right, time for the "and finally," and most of you probably know by now that those grey, yellow and green squares showing up in our socialfeeds is in fact the daily web—based game wordle. well, this week, the new york times bought it for an undisclosed sum in the low seven figures and has said the game would initially remain free. so go on then — what's your starter word?

feels nice at the moment. you know, i've had worse things on my head over the years. i am here at digital construction week in london's excel centre, which features some of the industry's newest tech. it's the world's most accurate augmented reality device. we are able to position it into position. david is one of the founders of the company behind these augmented reality headsets specially created for the construction industry. if you think back to your school days, you might remember these. these are 2d elevations of a complicated bit of 3d engineering, and the idea is that the construction workers look at these plans and then build it in the real world. but apparently they don't always get things right, and myjob is to go onto the site and see whether

they stuck to the plans or not. i would like to ask you, what do you see? do you see any deviations between the design, which is the hologram, and what's there in reality? maybe if you have a walk around and see if you can spot the difference. and i have to say, it becomes immediately and shockingly obvious that some of the pipework here doesn't match the augmented reality version. some of the pipes are a few centimetres out. they're what's called out of tolerance. even worse, some valves are pointing in the wrong direction, and some aren't even there. and what you're able to see is the model and what actually happened in reality. i found another one. the hoofer doofer was supposed to come up here, and they put it this way. now it becomes really obvious

how those 2d drawings can be more confusing than seeing it in real life. that's right, but throughout my career i became obsessed with why we're still using 2d drawings, and ifelt it was the 2d drawing process itself that was introducing these errors, because it is limiting. we went out and we did a study of exactly how much of works are built out of tolerance, and we found that up to 80% of construction works is built out of tolerance. so built slightly in the wrong place. i wish it was slightly. som bot by five to ten millimetres, but by 200 to 400 millimetres, which is substantial. apart from mistakes and misinterpretations, there are many decent reasons why building work may have to deviate from the plans, depending on the realities of the environment. but the important thing is for a construction manager to be able to walk the site and spot those deviations and decide whether they or the plans need fixing. hang on, we've got another pipe problem. look. right, there's another pipe that's supposed to be going that way, and they made it go that way. there is a pipe that's supposed to be going

there, and it's not. it's not here at all. exactly. well, they forgot to put in a pipe. or there was a change made on site where they decided to go outside. once this is handed off to the next trade or the next set of work starts, because that has a knock—on impact on the rest of the building process. and that wouldn't be spotted until when? until it's too late, if i'm being serious about it. unlike other augmented reality headsets, the xyz system uses these lasers to sweep across the site and precisely locate all of the helmets. this then taps into the site co—ordinate system to put the ar building exactly where it should be in your vision. so would you sign off this piece of works? no, they forgot to put this on. this is just shoddy. this is shoddy. building buildings is a large,

complicated, messy business, and it's been a surprise to find out that things don't always go to plan, literally. but maybe with a system like this, we'll see fewer missing hoofer doofers in the future. hoofer doofer? technical term — move on. 0k. now, the modern music business is defined by technology, from the way that our favourite songs are created right through to how we listen to them. but one key part of the industry, namely how people actually get paid, is still playing catch—up, as paul carter has been finding out. what is the music industry? famous stars, hit songs, streaming services, record labels. or — money. people making it, people wanting it, orfighting over who has the rights to it. but often behind all the hit songs which you know and love

are often a team of people you don't — musicians, producers and audio engineers all helping to make a track. for doing this, they earn royalties, money paid each time a track gets played on a streaming service, on the radio or on tv. in 2021 the uk music rights society, ppl, which collects this money, paid out £229 million of royalties to artists. but in the same year, the us music rights group mlc put aside a whopping $424 million of so—called black box money. the actual name for the black box money is unidentified money, so money coming in, but there's no way of finding out where the money should go. so while the big artists may make millions of dollars off a track, some musicians, producers or composers who helped bring it to life

in the studio miss out because they can't be identified or the paper trail has got confused. it's so easy for all that information to go out the window, and you're like, what was that person's surname? and i've had personal experience of writing a whole song with someone and then at the end of the day realising i only knew their pseudonym or their artist name, not their real name. and the moneyjust sits there, waiting for someone to claim it. but one company may have come up with the answer, and of course, it's tech. session is a tool that helps creators to capture all the important data around who did what, where and when when you create music — all the data that is needed later to be able to pay

the creators if there is money coming in for this song, and also to credit the creators when the song is out on a streaming services. it's a very different approach to how it currently works. normally, it would be a bunch of publishers or managers or agents after the fact, scrabbling about trying to work out who was in the room what day, what was the song title, who actually wrote that song, and it's an absolute nightmare. you can imagine how inefficient it is to try and find that information out afterwards. it's almost impossible. but with session, when a musician arrives at a studio to make a recording, they scan a qr code to sign in. each musician has a unique identifying number, and this is automatically assigned to the tracks they work on. my view on the problem is that you must go to the source. if we feed the music industry with a lot of different platforms and databases with the wrong information, it will still be wrong, so capturing the data here with session solves

so many problems downstream. in some ways, it's a simple idea. butjoining the dots between the many parts of the music industry attracted the legendary bjorn ulvaeus of abba to invest in the project, as he believes it could become a lot more important. i think that there's no reason why not every song that is injected into the digital system shouldn't have the relevant codes and the identifiers. when that happens then everyone will get paid — as simple as that. and i realised i understand the plight of the songwriters today, with 50,000 songs coming into spotify every day, and i just want to help. so while this app may not be

the answer to increasing the levels musicians get paid, or even changing how much of a track they are worth, what it might do is make sure that money which could support artists doesn't go missing. and for some musicians, keeping the money flowing may be one way to keep the music alive. paul carter there, talking to the legendary bjorn ulvaeus about... # money, money, money, must be funny in a rich man's world... and that's all we've got time for this week. as ever, you can find us on social media, youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter @bbcclick. # ..in a rich man's world. # bye—bye.

hello. we're certainly starting to see the signs of spring on the ground and in the trees in parts of the uk, all being helped certainly on tuesday by well above—average temperatures — widely 12—14 degrees across england and wales, just a touch cooler in scotland, northern ireland. but a much cooler end to the week on the way. temperatures dropping down, but closer to where it should be for this stage in february. that cooler air has been to the north of us. it'll be pushing southwards beyond this weather front, which, overnight, only slowly works its way southwards and eastwards, the mildest air becoming confined to the southern half of england and wales as we start wednesday morning. a chilly start further north with some ice in places, covering of snow and the showers overnight in scotland. those wintry showers continuing through the day here and on the hills and northern ireland, best of the sunshine to the south and east. brightening up in northern england, north wales through the morning, and after a damp start

through the rest of wales and the midlands, should turn brighter into the afternoon. but after a bright start in southern areas, it turns cloudier and damper, breezier, too. strongest of the winds with gusts in excess of 50—60 mph across the north, where it could feel colder than four or five celsius would suggest. still holding onto that milder air in southernmost counties. where we'll continue see clouds and rain into the night through wednesday night into thursday morning, attention turns to what's happening in the north of scotland. we could see severe gales develop with more extensive snow to take us into thursday morning. those strong winds stop temperatures widely falling below freezing, but it will be a cold start to thursday morning with subzero temperatures on the hills. and with severe gales gusting 60—70 mph in the north of scotland to begin with, heavy snow for a while — that breaks up into sunshine and showers. showers on and off through the day across some western areas, brightening up to the south after a hazy start, and some sunshine continuing in the east through the afternoon. but all of us will feel chillier than the past few days. add on the effect of the wind, a substantial wind—chill for parts of scotland, feeling subzero as we go through thursday afternoon. with that colder air in place, a ridge of high pressure building in — the blue colours showing the cold air —

it'll be the coldest morning of the week as we head into friday. temperatures widely below freezing right across the uk, maybe —6 or —7 through parts of scotland. but a lovely, bright start to the day, crisp, sunshine overhead, a few mist and fog patches. cloud increases from the west, one or two showers here and there before the day's out, and many places will stay dry and bright. that's how it's looking. see you soon.

welcome to bbc news — i'm david eades. our top stories... another frantic day of diplomacy over ukraine — it's been called the worst crisis in europe for more than three decades. protests against covid vaccine laws continue in canada — truckers had earlier blocked a key route into the us. pope benedict xvi admits to errors in the handling of sexual abuse cases when he was archbishop of munich. i wonder what little lady made these. and — the dogs in the hunt — we'll tell you about the western leading the pack for oscar nominations.