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A small provincial town in Thailand is cashing in on Chinese demand for bird's nest, building multi-storey condos to accommodate its lucrative feathered friends. Luke Duggleby looks at the allure of the 'caviar of the East'
Pak Phanang has experienced a building boom in recent decades.
Straddling an estuary in Thailand's Nakhon Si Thammarat province, the town is home to a little more than 15,000 people and it receives few visitors. Nevertheless, Pak Phanang, 600km south of Bangkok, is dotted with at least 500 recently constructed windowless white buildings, many as high as eight storeys.
They are not intended for human inhabitants, though, but for birds; swiftlets to be exact. And the bounty collected from these "bird's-nest condos" has made many locals here very rich.
( Aerodramus germani) is indigenous to much of Southeast Asia but, in Thailand, it was once believed to have nested in only some 170 caves that dot the country's southern islands. About 80 years ago, though, a family living in the centre of Pak Phanang found swiftlet nests in the roof of their home. Word spread and others investigated; many houses in the town were found to have the same type of nests among their attic beams. The swiftlets seemed to like Pak Phanang, and their nests, a Chinese delicacy, provided a welcome addition to the income of locals.
It wasn't until many decades later that the townsfolk began to build accommodation exclusively for the birds, expanding from the typical two-storey wooden house to large, white, concrete tower blocks.
As Pak Phanang was laying out the red carpet for swiftlets, people elsewhere in Thailand began to realise that they, too, were receiving winged visitors. In fact, anywhere a suitable nesting site was discovered within the bird's natural range, it moved in.