Protect The Swiftlets & Harvesters
To unpack the sustainable and ethical concerns behind bird's nests, we first need to understand the mating habits of swiftlets who produce them.
Sustainble Bird's Nests
Consuming bird's nests does not have to mean destroying their homes.
Each mating season, swiftlets build new nests made from mainly their own saliva. Swiftlets only use their nests for one mating season. After the baby birds fly out of the nests, they leave the nests and build new nests for the next mating season.
Sustainable Harvesting: the practice of only harvesting the bird's nests when the swiftlets are gone.
Bird's nests houses are too profit driven by the high demand to care about their impact on the swiftlets and the environment. This is an extremely short term view as the dwindling swiftlet population in the area affects the future yield of bird's nests.
High Demand, Low Supply
Bird's nests houses are too profit driven by the high demand to care about their impact on the swiftlets and the environment. This is an extremely short term view as the dwindling swiftlet population affects the future yield of bird's nests.
Consumers also do not demand for sustainable harvesting, leading to a lack of interest to do so from suppliers when harvesting.
Ethical Bird's Nests
Ethical harvesting cares for the environment and farmers.
Cave bird's nests are located on high caverns of limestone caves, making it an extremely dangerous endeavour for farmers to harvest them. Farmers have to scale these dark sheer rock cliffs without the use of modern equipments. Injury and deaths are often common, which further drive up the price of cave nests.
For house bird's nests, conditions can be controlled leading to a much safer farming method. This practice is cruelty-free for the farmers who to harvest the nests.
Sustainable and ethical bird's nests is only possible for house nests, not cave nests.
We practice sustainable and ethical farming practices on own bird's nests houses and work with suppliers we know whose practice will not infringe on the environment. This process might be an invisible one to the end-consumers, but we believe is an extremely important one in order to preserve these swiftlets and provide a good working condition for the local communities we work with.
Furthermore, as our bird's nests are from Malaysia, they are all transported via land instead of air. This reduces our carbon footprint compared to other bird's nests that are flown in from Indonesia, Thailand or Vietnam.
