One More Birdhouse Under Reconstruction !!!

A case, similar to a unit at Port Klang, is under a reconstruction in Tanjung Malim, Perak.

Tanjung Malim is used to be called as a the Proton City Of Malaysia. This was the place where Proton, Malaysian National Car Project, build their assembly plant for Gen2 cars.

The town is located at the Southern tip of Perak close to the state of Selangor. The town surrounding are well suited for swiftlet colonies to breed. There are many plantations, virgin forests and rivers. The best is that the time taken to reach from Kuala Lumpur is exactly about 1 hour. This town is considered ideal from investors from Kuala Lumpur to built their dream birdhouses....

I was not suprised that there were at least 50 birdhouses in the area and mostly being from abandoned shoplots.

Jack indicated that monthly birdnest harvest was about 20 kilograms a month and growing.



He also estimated that there are at least two new shoplots being converted every month but the success rate remain very low, about 15% to 20%. To him this is pretty good since he can "cari makan" to reconstruct these houses.

When I was in Tanjung Malim, Jack took me to view an old unit which he and his gang were given the tasks to reconstruct. This particular unit consisted of three two stories shophouses each measuring about 20' X 70'. They are side by site using one sound system, and one entrance hole. The connecting walls were taken down in total.



Just imagine, if you put them on the top of each other it will become a six stories building, 20' X 70'. It is huge and if the whole house is fully occupied you can imagine how many kilos the owner will harvest per month (30 kilos X 6 = 180 kilos).

The building was originally converted by a so call "Consultant" and it was considered as a five stars but lack of many basic charecteristics. There were no roving areas provided, no water pools included, not a single humidifiers allocated , no temperature recorder, not enought tweeters and nearly all the rooms were very bright (more then 2 lux). The only beautiful architecture were those superb construction of the nesting planks. They used a three tiers wooden plank nesting configuration on all the walls but not a single nest after one year of operation.



The owner was said to have spend more then RM150,000 on renovations works and after one year of operations not a single birdnest was found in the house. Pethatic and absolutely unbelievable.

This is another case of a shoplot owner who have too little or no knowledge on swiftlet farming and he trusted his so call Sifu to do everything but got nothing. He lost RM 150,000 and now have to appoint a new consultant with a new price tag of at least RM 50,000.

I am sure money is not an issue to him but we should learned from the mistakes that he got into.



The true lesson from this new apisode is " Get the basic knowledge on swiftlet farming and don't let your consultant be given a blank cheque to do what he wanted".

Worst case is to adorpt a milestone payment contract basis. You only pay upon the number of nests found in your house. No nest, no payment.