Wired for Birds

A good wire tangle with a bit of poo on top

 The attached photo at first glance is just another example of tangled wires. But look a little closer and it is easy to see some upper wires are splotched in white. The critter that did the splotching is Hirundo Rustica, a Barn Swallow. Oddly enough, these swallows would flock to the Silom/Convent Rd. area in huge numbers every fall and stay through the winter. Each night, they were infamous for splotching not only the wires, but the sidewalks, parked cars, pedestrians, street stalls, fruit baskets, and anything that was below them. Bird banding programs estimated the numbers in the hundreds of thousands in their heyday. Apparently, 1982 while we were in Bangkok, was part of their heyday.

The birds spend their summers in northern Mongolia. When it starts to get cold though, who can blame them for migrating to someplace warmer? But the heart of Bangkok? There are lots of statues for the pigeons to decorate, but the swallows seem to be attracted to the wires only in the Silom area and must take delight in turning the sidewalks and pedestrians white with poo. Each morning, shop owners would come out and hose down their side walks to turn them gray for the day making a clean canvas for the swallows to decorate overnight.

I’m not sure where the birds went during the day, but they seemed to disappear. I can only assume they had some hunting grounds where they could load up on bugs, digesting them to supply fuel for their nightly bombardment. The circle of life! There were wires all over Bangkok at the time so why did they come just to Silom/Convent? That is a mystery only the swallows know.

Interestingly, more or less across Silom Rd. from the intersection of Convent Rd/Silom Rd. is Patpong Road. Patpong Road was, and remains, an infamous “redlight district” and certainly has the bars and clubs to live up to its’ reputation. At the same time, there were and are a number of nice restaurants as well in that area. In 1982, the Thai Room restaurant was one of the few places one could get western style food and Foodland was a small, western-style grocery store. Close to the Bangkok Christian Guest House and with some western-style food and products, Patpong was the haunt of many missionaries as well as bar crawlers. Patpong is also in the Barn Swallow poo district.

We first arrived in Bangkok in November at the peak of swallow time. On any evening stroll along Silom, Convent or Patpong roads, the number of swallows was truly impressive. The were flying, flitting, swooping and pooping everywhere. They were hard to look at though, as with any glance upward the risk of a drop of poo in the eye was very real.  There was no hope of keeping your clothes clean and without a hat, a hair washing was priority one upon returning home.

 It could be true, or it could be an urban legend, but we were told that many wayward husbands were found out when they returned home with bird poo covered cars. There was only one place in Bangkok where the birds were so concentrated that cars would be splotched everywhere. That place was the redlight district of Patpong Rd. and there was only one reason one went to Patpong Rd. at night.

On a sobering note, I don’t believe the swallows make much of an appearance any more. I did a little internet searching and the highest bird count I saw was an estimate of 250,000 swallows that made the trip to the Silom area back a number of years ago. In more recent years, the last time I could find that anyone did a count, there were only a few thousand birds. Hopefully, that is not an indication of the total swallow population but with so much habitat destruction around the world it is plausible. I would love to be wrong about this though, so if anyone knows differently, please let me know.

On another sobering note, prostitution and associated human trafficking is rampant in Thailand and while we want to have fun with this blog, we don’t want to make light of the matter. Work of our Baptist missionaries like Lauren Bethell, Jeff and Annie Dieselberg, Kit Ripley, and others make tireless efforts to offer alternatives and free victims of trafficking and we encourage their support.