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Tradition dictates that a Javanese man must possess five things to be a real man: a house, a woman, a horse, a dagger and a caged bird. The obsession with birds has spread to other ethnic groups, too, and these days, all kinds of birds are trapped and sold to satisfy the demand for them.

The market for pet birds has also created a market for bird food, including the larvae and pupae of red weaver ants, a favorite among insect-eating birds. Called kroto in Javanese, the ant larvae and pupae are actually eaten by people in Thailand and the Philippines, and they are said to taste creamy. In Java, however, the dish is reserved as a treat for captive songbirds.

In Javanese villages, kroto hunting can be a source of regular income. Sugiono,42, is a kroto hunter from Kayutrejo village in Ngawi district, East Java, who supports his family by gathering kroto within walking distance of his home.

“Kroto gathering is better than working in someone else’s rice fields,” he said. “I have no one to order me around and can take my time. I don’t have to toil in the hot sun and work mostly in the shade, as most weaver ant nests are in big trees.

“I only have to work half a day, from about 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and I take every Friday off because I go for noon prayers at the mosque on Fridays.”

Sri Indarti, Sugiono’s wife, helps out by taking the kroto to a local dealer who buys the haul and sells it to bird markets as far away as Solo in Central Java or Surabaya, the capital of East Java.

“My husband has worked various jobs,” said Sri, 35. “He used to be a debt collector for a local moneylender, but that work ended. Then he worked as a handyman with an electrical contractor, but the hours were too long.”

After that, she said, he caught fish in the rivers, collected snails and even went to Jakarta to work in construction.

“Kroto gathering is the best job he has ever had because he gets a lot of spare time,” she said. “In his spare time he can trap birds and collect naturally formed bonsai [trees] to sell.”

Sugiono and Sri have three children. The eldest, 18-year-old Wahyu, is still in school. He helps trap birds to sell and drives his mother to the kroto dealer on the back of the family motorbike.

The family lives in an unplastered brick house with a dirt floor, but they are not considered poor by village standards — in addition to owning a motorbike, they have a TV and a DVD player.

They can earn Rp 1 million to Rp 1.5 million ($110 to $170) each month by selling 1 to 1.5 kilograms of kroto, which goes for Rp 35,000 to Rp 50,000 per kilogram at the local dealer. They make more than the regional minimum wage or what a seasonal farm laborer would earn in the long term, because seasonal farm laborers spend a lot of time unemployed.

Weaver ants get their name because they “weave” together several leaves to make their nests, where they tend to their larvae and pupae.

To collect the kroto, Sugiono uses a long bamboo pole with a pointed end and a cloth basket attached to it. He uses the pointed end to pierce the woven leaves, and then the pupae and larvae fall into the cloth basket.

Sugiono usually leaves home to gather kroto at around 7 a.m.

“Today I’ll work on the ant nests in Ngembong, a village around a kilometer from my house,” he said. “I left my equipment in the village market there so I wouldn’t have to carry it all the way from my house.”

Sugiono has a circular route that covers about seven kilometers, and he returns to the same place to harvest larvae every three to four weeks.

“About four other larvae gatherers work in the same area, but we tend to avoid each other’s beats,” Sugiono said one morning as he set off for work.

The only real hazard of the job is the ants themselves, he said, though he must also watch out for venomous snakes.

“The ants get very angry when you poke their nests and will come down to bite you,” he said. “The weaver ant’s bite stings, and when there are hundreds biting you, they can get pretty annoying.”

Sometimes he puts lime on his skin and on his bamboo poles to discourage the ants from biting. “But sometimes I don’t bother and just let them bite until my hands are free to squash them,” he added.

Sugiono’s eyes are trained to scour the tree foliage for the telltale shape of the weaver ants’ nests.

“They tend to stay in the same trees, so I keep on going back to places where I know they are,” he said.

He usually gets a few grams of larvae and pupae, separates it all from the ants, and allows the ants to climb back into their tree to breed again. By the time he heads home, he said, his sack of kroto is a little larger than a loaf of bread.

Since kroto do not last long, the day’s harvest must immediately go to the dealer, a man named Semin who lives 30 minutes away by motorbike. At Semin’s house, the sack is emptied and weighed. In a recent trip, the scale read 1.3 kilograms with a per-kilogram price of Rp 45,000, plus a bonus of Rp 5,000, making his morning’s earnings Rp 63,500. It’s not bad for half a day’s work, considering that skilled bricklayers or carpenters in the village earn a maximum of Rp 45,000 for a full day.

Semin, 45, has 12 kroto gatherers who sell their catch to him, and every day he takes about 10 kilograms of kroto on a two-hour bus ride to Solo, where he sells to a big dealer rather than the bird market.

“I get between Rp 10,000 and Rp 20,000 for each kilogram of kroto, but sometimes the prices drop and I lose money,” he said. “Kroto don’t last so I need to sell them for whatever the price is that day. After paying for the bus and other expenses, I usually bring home between Rp 70,000 and Rp 100,000.”

Last year when the country was hit by itchy caterpillar attacks, experts speculated that the caterpillar population had exploded in part because the weaver ants’ larvae and pupae were being collected too heavily. Some districts, like Karanganyar in the Solo region, considered banning kroto collectors.

“If they ban kroto collecting here, I will ask the district chief to feed my family,” Semin said. “There aren’t many jobs in the village that make as much money as kroto collection.”

“We don’t ask anything from the government. The government must compensate us if they ban us,” he added, packing up his ant larvae to sell to the dealer in Solo.
Above, Sugiono separates the larvae and pupae from the ants so the ants can return to the tree to make new nests.