On the Brink

In 1990, the French photographer Eric Valli spent over a year at a gigantic sea cave called Rimau ("Tiger") Cave on the southwestern coast of Thailand, photographing how the local minority people gather swiftlets' nests. When his pictures were published in National Geographic Magazine, many people saw for the first time how the nest gatherers pluck the nests from the sheer cliffs.

A price in human lives

Because swiftlets build their nests on rock faces hundreds of feet from the ground, harvesting them is extraordinarily difficult work. The nest gatherers must go deep into the pitch-dark caves, where, with no machinery, gripping torches in their mouths, they hold themselves fast with one hand to weblike trellises of bamboo lashed together with vines, while with a special tool in their other hand they chisel the nests from the rock.

In one swiftlet cave in Malaysia, eight people have fallen to their deaths in the space of three years. The difficult technique of nest harvesting is usually passed down from father to son as a family secret, and many families have several members with arms or legs missing.

The dark, damp air thick with wheeling, twittering swiftlets, and the many accidents on the sheer cliffs. led traditional nest hunters to believe that the huge black caves were the property of spirits, and that if one did not gain the cave spirits' permission before entering, one would anger them and put oneself in peril.

Thus before beginning their harvest each year the traditional nest gatherers would first make a ceremonial sacrifice to the cave, killing a water buffalo which they offered in return for harvesting this natural resource.

Giving the swiftlets a chance

Because of their respect for nature, the traditional nest gatherers would not dare to strip the caves clean. According to records made by the Western biologist Medway in 1958, nest gatherers in Sarawak made harvests twice yearly in November and February, and they left the third nests for the swiftlets to hatch their eggs and raise their young. In his report, Medway noted that although the harvesting season differed from area to area, all the local people applied the same principles.

Is it because the advance of science and technology has destroyed people's belief in cave spirits that some of the nest gatherers have succumbed to temptation, or is it because of the rising price of birds' nests? In the second half of the 20th Century, their respect for nature has changed. In Sabah, Sarawak and many other places today, the traditional way of harvesting has disappeared. The old ways left the swiftlets the chance to survive, but today's harvest continues uninterrupted all year, and has caused a marked decline in the birds' numbers.

Eric Valli observes that there are two kinds of nest hunters today: those of the old school who still sacrifice a buffalo to the cave spirits each year before beginning their harvest; and the younger generation who generally believe that a successful harvest and safe return depend entirely on their own skill. Today there are also nest hunters who use hydraulic lifts instead of scaling the old bamboo trellises, making nest harvesting much safer and much easier.

On many small southeast Asian islands, the cliffs are still festooned with frameworks of bamboo which lead into the swiftlet caves, but just like abandoned mineshafts, the bamboo is rotten, the caves are empty and the birds are gone.

A sense of gratitude

Mainland Chinese author Mo Yan once wrote a story about nest gathering. In it he describes how the swiftlets' way of building their nests with saliva is one of the wonders of the natural world, but the rich and powerful who eat the nests know nothing of the swiftlets' labors, and still less of those of the nest gatherers, so that they have no sense of the nests' value. The family of the story's main character are nest gatherers, and after she grows up, whenever she is cleaning dirt off swiftlets' nests with a needle, the terrifying scene of the nest harvest appears before her eyes. She hopes that people who cook and eat the nests will do so with a sense of infinite respect, for each of them bears the anguish, blood and tears of both swiftlets and humans.

Today, thanks to photography and the news media, more people understand the efforts of the swiftlets and toil of the nest gatherers. But unlike the past, today's self-confident young harvesters care little about people's gratitude, and still less about the swiftlets themselves, whose numbers are continuously dwindling.

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Do those who eat nests know the arduous work the birds and the collectors go through? Nest-hunters have to trust their lives to slender vines as they scale sheer cliffs as high as 400 feet. (courtesy of Cerebos(Taiwan) Ltd.)