There were significant differences among the diets of Glossy Swiftlets foraging over areas of different landuse. In general, moving from forest to rural to urban habitat, the proportion of the diet made up of smaller bodied diptera increased while the proportion of hymenoptera decreased. This change in diet may represent a change in food preference, or more probably, simply a change in the available prey related to landuse. Considering the implications of this result for the two commercially important ‘edible nest’ species, changing land-use is likely to have a larger negative impact on the Black-nest Swiftlet, whose diet appears
to be very specialized and heavily biased towards hymenoptera, and ants in particular. Since the diet of the White-nest Swiftlet appears to be relatively diverse, already talung a large proportion of diptera, we predict that this species should be able to adapt its diet
to the prey available in rural and urban areas, and hence be a suitable candidate for ‘house-nest farming’ enterprises.