Indonesia harvests birds’ nests seen as Chinese delicacy
PERAPAKAN, Indonesia — With no windows, the gloomy, gray building looming four stories above the rice fields in a remote village in Indonesian Borneo resembles nothing more than a prison.
Hundreds of similar concrete structures, riddled with small holes for ventilation, tower over village shops and homes all along Borneo’s northwestern coast.
But these buildings are for the birds. Specifically, the swiftlet, which builds its nests inside.
Zulkibli, 56, a government worker who built his giant birdhouse in the village of Perapakan in 2010, supplements his income by harvesting the swiftlets’ nests and selling them for export to China.
The nests, made from the birds’ saliva, are the key ingredient in bird’s nest soup, an expensive delicacy believed by many Chinese to have health benefits.
Left to their own devices, swiftlets usually make their nests in coastal caves, where harvesting them can be hazardous work. The key to attracting the birds to a human-made home, Zulkibli said, is treating them like “rich humans” and guaranteeing their comfort and safety. Zulkibli, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.
“Comfort, by regulating the temperature,” he said. “Safety, by keeping pests and predators away. The swiftlet house must be really clean. They don’t even like spiders.”
Government officials say Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of swiftlet nests. Sambas Regency, the county-sized region in West Kalimantan province where Perapakan is located, is a major producer, with the birds thriving in its marshy coastal areas, rich with insects.
The bird-nest business can be lucrative. Over the past decade, so many property owners in this sparsely populated region of coconut palms and banana trees were eager to cash in that the number of birdhouses here jumped fivefold, Zulkibli said.
In a twist on condo conversions, some people even remodeled the upper floors of their homes — blacking out windows and drilling ventilation holes — to make them habitable for swiftlets.
Swiftlets are fast-flying, insect-eating birds that can cover vast distances in a day, using echolocation to navigate in low-light environments.
They build as many as three nests a year, Zulkibli said, frequently changing their nesting sites.
With the region’s glut of birdhouses, many now have vacancies. “The birds have many choices,” Zulkibli said.
So owners compete to lure the swiftlets by playing recordings of the clicking sounds they make as they echolocate.
The small, delicate nests are carefully harvested with a specialized tool similar to a paint scraper and then cleaned. Intact white nests bring the best prices.
The theft of birds nests is a common problem. Zulkibli said his birdhouse has been burgled 20 times, with the thieves sometimes breaking through its concrete walls.
Birdhouse owners say they wait until the fledglings have left the nest before they harvest, and neither the parents nor their babies are harmed. But sometimes, burglars steal nests prematurely, killing hatchlings.
Just south of Sambas Regency, the coastal city of Singkawang was once a major nest producer. But today it suffers from the local version of empty nest syndrome.
Known for its large ethnic Chinese population and colorful Buddhist and Taoist temples, Singkawang now serves as a trading center where businesspeople buy nests and ship them 500 miles south to the capital, Jakarta, for export.