Windowless, the bleak, gray building looming four stories above rice paddies 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 shops and village houses across the north-west coast of Borneo.
But these buildings are not for people. It’s for the birds. Specifically, the swiftlet, which makes its nests inside.
Zulkibli, 56, a civil servant who built his giant bird in the village of Perapakan in 2010, supplements his income by picking up the trash nests and selling them for export to China.
The nests, made from the birds’ saliva, are the main ingredient in bird’s nest soup, an expensive delicacy that many Chinese believe has health benefits.
Left to their own devices, swiftlets usually make their nests in coastal caves, where harvesting them can be dangerous work. The key to attracting birds to an artificial home, Mr. Zulkibli said, is to treat them like “rich people” and guarantee their comfort and safety. Mr Zulkibli, like many Indonesians, has a name.
“Comfort, regulating the temperature,” he said. “Safety, keeping pests and predators away. The bouncy 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 insect-rich marshy coastal areas.
The bird nest business can be profitable. Over the past decade, so many property owners in this sparsely populated area of coconut palms and banana trees have been eager to cash in that the number of houses here has quintupled, Mr. Zulkibli said.
In a twist on apartment conversions, some people have even remodeled the upper floors of their homes—blacking out windows and opening vents—to make them livable for trash.
Swiftlets are fast-flying, insectivorous birds that can travel vast distances in a day, using echolocation to navigate low-light environments. They build up to three nests a year, Mr Zulkibli said, frequently changing their nesting sites.
Due to the abundance of birdhouses in the area, many now have vacancies.
“Birds have a lot of options,” Mr Zulkibli said.
So owners compete to lure the swiftlets by playing recordings of the clicking sounds they make.
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.
Bird nest theft is a common problem. Mr Zulkibli said his bird has been stolen 20 times, with thieves sometimes breaking through its concrete walls.
Bird owners say they wait until the chicks leave the nest before harvesting and that neither the parents nor the babies are harmed. But sometimes, burglars steal nests prematurely, killing the hatchlings in the process.
Inside Mr. Zulkibli’s 50-foot-tall aviary, wooden beams cross the ceilings, creating spaces for the birds to build their nests. Each vent is covered with mesh to keep out vermin and connected to a short, curved tube that blocks light, helping to reproduce the gloom of a cave. A pool of water at ground level helps cool the building and gives the birds a place to bathe.
The swiftlets enter at high speed through a rectangular opening at the top and reach the lower levels through 8 x 10 foot openings on each floor.
Although the pretzels provide an income, Mr Zulkibli said he was passionate about birds, as were his parents. They raised free-range pigeons and never served birds as food.
“We never ate duck or anything that could fly,” he said. “That’s one reason I want to protect birds. Many birds build their nests around my house here, maybe because they feel safe with me.”
Once they settled into their nests, he said, they let him pet them.
Just south of Sambas Regency, the coastal town of Singkawang was once a major nest producer. Today, however, he suffers from the local version of the empty nest syndrome.
Known for its large Chinese population and colorful Buddhist and Taoist temples, Singkawang now serves as a trading center where businessmen buy nests and ship them 500 miles south to the capital, Jakarta, for export.
Dozens of large birdhouses, some five stories high, still dot Singkawang. But as its human population has grown to 250,000, fewer swiftlets have come to town.
Birds were plentiful as recently as 2010, when Yusmida converted the top two floors of her house into a house for swiftlets. But a few years later, Singkawang’s largest shopping center was built next door. Since then, her bird nursery has remained empty.
“No birds have come for a decade,” he lamented.
On the outskirts of Singkawang, about 60 miles north of the equator, a farmer, Suhardi, 52, built some of the region’s first birdhouses in 2000. For more than a decade, birds were plentiful and his business profitable.
At its peak, he said, he could produce 10 kilograms of nests a month, or about 22 pounds, which he could sell for $20,000 — a huge income for an Indonesian farmer. Now, if he collects anything more than three pounds a month and sells it for $1,500, he considers himself lucky.
He blames not so much the overbuilding of birdhouses as the warming of climate change and the clearing of nearby jungle to make way for palm oil plantations, which destroyed the ecosystem the birds relied on for food.
“The earth is getting warmer and the intensity of the sun is hot,” Mr Suhardi said. “In the past there were forests to reduce the heat. And with the forest disappearing, their food source is also gone.”
It doesn’t help that the government now requires nest exports to go through a handful of traders in Jakarta, undercutting the price farmers got when they exported directly to China.
“With this situation, many of the bird’s nest farmers have given up smoking,” said Mr Suhardi. “They are selling their houses and land at a cheap price.”
Now, many of the birdhouses around Singkawang remain unused. Unlike human homes, birdhouses are left unpainted, adding to the sense of melancholy.
Mr. Suhardi, not expecting the swiftlet’s situation to improve soon, has turned to planting avocados and durians.
“But I’ll still keep the birdhouses,” he said, “and check them every month or two.”
This article was produced with support from the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Round Earth Media program.
