During the weekend I was passing a reasonable sized padi field in my hometown, Sungai Patani.
What attracted me most while driving was the number of swiftlets flying above.
There were at least 500 to 1000 birds flying in a manner where you can easily concluded that they were eating something that were blown upward.
What I did was to stop my car and walked towards those padi plants.
I wanted to check what kind of insects were coming from those padi plants.
It took some good minutes to detect the insects.
They were so small and their color were similar to the riping rice sacks. The young ones were green in color.
The camoflush really works.
I took lots of pictures and wanted to share with all my blog readers.
The most common were these padi hoppers that feeds on the young saps of the padi seeds.
Every plant I can easily detected not less then 4 to 5 of them.
The young one were so small and everytime the will blows I am sure some will be trapped with the wind and lifted above.
This must be the insects those birds were catching.
Have a good look and if you happened to pass any padi fields just stop and check yourself.
We need to learn and understand why the birds seem to prefer those padi field areas.
I am of the opinion that these plant hoppers are damanging the padi output.
The moment they suck those young milk from the padi sacks, they actually make the sack empty.
Just imagine if one day they need to suck one sack? The number of empty sacks will be in the thousands and this will reduce the yield of each harvest.
The number of empty sacks can be observed during the windnowing. Usually farmers do this by using the wind by alllowing the rice to drop from the air. Those will not seed inside will be blown away.
What the swiftlet does is to eat as many as they can and help to minimise the spread of these predators (padi field).
Interesting function of swiftlet I guess.
1 comment:
nice post. thanks.
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