Edible Nest Research Articles

The function of echonavigation among swiftlets

The sensitivity of the echonavigating system of Collocalia fuciphaga was tested under experimental conditions. In total darkness these swiftlets were able to fly and to avoid collision with the walls of the flight chamber, but apparently had difficulty in detecting a barrier of vertical wooden rods 1 cm square in crosssection, placed 15 cm apart. One Collocalia esculenta was also tested. It apparently lacked all ability to orientate in flight in darkness and was unable to avoid collision with the walls of the flight chamber.

Malayan Wild-Life

THE war in Malaya is no doubt interfering with the very interesting wild-life of that region, and the observations that have so long centred upon it. Robinson and Chasen's work on the birds of Malaya describes such interesting items as the breeding habits of the edible-nest swiftlets, the gorgeous sunbirds and the spider-hunters. Malaya has some seven hundred birds including about forty game birds and pigeons. An earlier official publication on the birds of Singapore gives a list of more than a hundred species, including eleven of the sixteen Malayan kingfishers and many interesting doves, hornbills, the vividly coloured little red and orange flower-peckers that haunt the tree-tops, the rollers, the bee-eaters and several swifts. Many species well known in Britain are winter visitors or migrants from northern Asia, including snipe, golden plover, redshank, turnstones, greenshank, and grey plover. The roseate and gull-billed terns are regular birds of Singapore island, the Kentish plover nests on the sandy shores and herons and white egrets fish the marshes. The fishing owl is a very common bird. The “Handbook to British Malaya”states that the fauna of British Malaya is excelled in number of species only in parts of South America. The one-horned Javan rhinoceros is almost extinct, and the common rhinoceros, like the Malayan elephant, has been much persecuted for ivory. The ancient Malayan tapir survives, but the Malayan bison or seladand is almost extinct in certain districts. There are several deer, and the curious serow or goat antelope is in the remoter country. The Malaya tiger is smaller than the Indian, while monkeys and apes include the curious nocturnal slow loris and also orangs, which have often been collected for European zoos. Malaya is the metropolis of the squirrels and there are more than sixty bats, including the great flying fox or keluan with a wing span of nearly five feet, which haunts the coastal mangroves.

Edible Birds Nests in the Philippines

The edible nests of swiftlets, valued as a delicacy and as food for convalescents by the people of China, are built in limestone caves along the seashore in many parts of the Philippines. The export of the nests is in the hands of local Chinese merchants, and although accurate statistics are difficult to obtain it has been stated that the Netherlands Indies in 1927 exported 109,310 kilograms of nests valued at 822,913 guilders. In only one of the Philippine Islands, Bacuit, has an attempt been made to derive municipal revenue from the trade, when in 1927 the traditional ownership of the birds nest caves, which had existed for generations, was supplanted by municipal ownership and the annual leasing of the caves to the highest bidder. As a reply to this move, the Chinese dealers formed a ring so that the bidding, which reached 1,700 pesos in 1927, had fallen in 1936 to 500 pesos, and in a footnote to a recent paper on the subject, Canuto G. Manuel states that as no bid at all was offered in 1937, the caves have relapsed to the system of traditional ownership (Philippine J. Sci., 62, 379, March 1937). From Bacuit, approximately 500 kilograms or about 100,000 nests are exported annuallybut poaching of nests is common, and attempts to limit the collecting with the view of conserving the stock have met with little success. Nest collecting, however, is a dangerous occupation, and the fact that some inaccessible caves are tenanted by the birds, which belong to the racial form, Collocalia francica germani, provides for the survival of the swiftlet.

Short Notices

WITH commendable speed Mr. Stuart Baker's third volume follows the second (see NATURE, April 21, 1934, p. 591). Beginning with the weaver-birds, it completes the Passeres and the Coraciiformes, and some idea of the thoroughness with which the nesting of Indian birds has been investigated (as well as of blanks still remaining) may be gathered from the fact that of 704 species and subspecies included in these series, the nidification of 545 is here recorded. Like the earlier volumes, this also includes descrip tions of some extremely interesting nests and their construction, of which we need mention only those of the weaver-birds, the bee-eaters, and the edible-nest swiftlets. The work is as thorough and comprehensive as its predecessors.

On Edible Birds' Nests

On Edible Birds' Nests