\nwww.reuters.com\/article
\n PHETCHBURI, Thailand, Jan 18 (Reuters Life!) – The construction business is booming in the Thai coastal province of Phetchburi — but the buildings are for birds, not people
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\n In the middle of the small fishing village of Ban Laem, 120 km (75 miles) south of Bangkok, about 100 doorless, multi-storey units have shot up.<\/p>\n
Providing homes for thousands of small swiftlets, whose saliva-laced nests are the basic ingredient of “bird’s nest soup”, a prized Chinese delicacy, each four-storey condo costs up to 3.4 million baht (US$97,000) to build.<\/p>\n
But it’s an investment worth making, locals believe, with birds’ nests thought to be a source of longevity and good health and worth as much as $2,000 a kilogram.<\/p>\n
Aficionados will pay as much as $20 for a bowl of bird’s nest soup — around 20 times the cost of a bowl of standard noodle soup.<\/p>\n
“People even came from Bangkok or other provinces to invest in this business,” said Wattana Termwattanapat, head of a local birds’ nest group.<\/p>\n
Getting the flighty money makers to settle in the new houses can be hard, though.<\/p>\n
“Each building will have its own technique to attract the birds to live in them. There are a variety of techniques,” said Termwattanapat.<\/p>\n
Bird blocks attempt to create a “cave-like” ambience, with light blocked out, and temperatures kept cool by a water circulation system.<\/p>\n
Owners also play birdsong CDs and smear the walls in droppings to give the homes an authentic cave smell that attracts the birds that were first found living in a Buddhist temple in Ban Laem.<\/p>\n
Sparrow-sized swifts, found across Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, use their saliva to cement their nests to walls to protect them from predators.<\/p>\n
The whiter the nest, the higher the quality and more expensive.<\/p>\n
It takes about five days to build a nest and harvesters will take as many as three nests from a single pair of birds before allowing them to lay eggs.<\/p>\n
While one housing unit can contain up to 20,000 birds, it takes 150 birds to make 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of birds nest, meaning the housing blocks are a long-term investment.<\/p>\n
The convenient condos are safer than traditional methods of harvesting, which involve trained collectors climbing great heights to get the nests from caves, the birds’ typical nesting place.<\/p>\n
Birds-house builders enjoying the boom are not worried about lack of customers.<\/p>\n
“Anyone who comes to our project, we will build the building for them,” said Prajong Puangsuwan, who runs a bird house-building business. ($1 = 33 baht) (Reporting by Noppawan Bunluesilp; Editing by Gillian Murdoch)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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