The Tunnel Birdhouse Design: Marvellous !!!

Among the many birdhouse designs that I have been given the opportunities to visit I would say the "TUNNEL" is one of my top choice.

The design concept is something that I believed will give the birds a minimum stress and at the same time you let the birds to be channeled into the center of the house immediately after they swoop into your entrance hole.



The roving area cum nesting area is in the middle of the house and I have the strong feeling that his design if adorpted plus a few modifications will brings in the birds to stay.

The only disadvantage of the design in the amount of light that it brings in with it. The owner need to make sure that the light are minimised by various ways if he uses his brain.

I saw the design in Kuala Selangor, owned by Mr.A and yesterday in Segamat, owned by Mr.L.

Mr.L unit seem to me the more successful one with more then 10 fully formed nests within 5 months of operation.

This special unit was formerly owned by a mechanic and Mr.L took over without much knowledge on how to turn around to fill the house with birds.

Mr.L is a 36 years old Electronic Engineer turned a business man dealing with house furnitures. He operated his main business in JB, brought up in a small town called Labis and operate a birdhouse in Segamat. A bright young man with lots of potential to own many more birdhouses.

I was very impressed with the effort he put in to gather all that he wanted when he showed me a thick folder full of printed materials on swiftlet farming that he claimed to be so very valuable to him. He reads them every day, for now, to increase his knowledge and understanding of all the things on this new field. I was shocked to see the content of his file. They were all my articles from my swiftlet farming blockspot website. Oh my god. I never knew that they look so good when you printed them and keep in a folder.

I feel so honoured and like an author of a very beautiful book ....

Wah, now I am a celebrity ....

Coming back to the TUNNEL design concept, I have the following additional comments that you should judge by yourself:

1) The tunnel allows you to adorpt the open roof design features. This is one of the best entrance hole design that I fully endorse. The open hole is more superior to those dog kernel type. The system allows the birds to swoop down like the Kamakaze dive by those Japanese Plane warriors during their invation of Pearl Habour.
The open roof is also more pleasing to the eyes. More often you cannot see any different to the house design since they are at the back of the house.

2) You can have a pool of water in the open roof entrance area. This pool location is practically recommended by any sifus or consultants. I have no objection and if you can add more features like a mist spray or perhaps a water curtains pouring into the pool will be much better.

3) Immediately after the birds swoop in, you actually let them pass the tunnel and enter the roving area located in the middle of the house. The tunnel is wide enought to let the birds fly without any disturbances. I recommend the size of a 3 feet wide and perhaps 6 feet height. Make sure they do look like a tunnel...

4) Once in the roving area, minimum 12 feet by 12 feet, you now have your pertitioning to block those lights and create a number of nesting areas for your swiftlets to choose from. The number of nesting areas shall be subjected to the size of the floor and they must be again within 12 feet by 12 feet wide.

5) Each nesting room can be devided by partitioning (from floor up to the ceiling) or perhaps ceiling colony devider (from ceiling to about 1.5 feet downward) concept.

6) For a house with a standard dimension of 70 feet by 22 feet, you can actually have not less then 4 nesting areas and one roving area. This is more then adequate to get the maximum output from the house.

7) I also recommend the use of different sound in each nesting room chamber. If you have four, you should design in such a way that you can play four different musics. (Will explain in more details why in a new article).

8) Each room, must be with adequate electrical plug points to accommodate your humidifiers and any other gadgets to keep the microhabitat to work.

9) The wooden nesting strips is something that you have to be very carefull about. I was very dissappointed to observed that the nesting planks used in Mr.L birdhouse have lots of poor quality planks. They were too many planks with those branch marks and many were with cracks. You must select each and every plank during the construction. Reject those that shows any deformities or cracks.

10) The wooden strips must be installed as such that they are running in like opposing the light source. If the light comes in one direction, you need to block them from coming. So make sure you lay the planks in perpendicular and avoid the light.

11) They should be 30cm apart and by 100 cm matrix devider forming a kind of boxes on your ceiling.

12) Make sure that the planks are touching the ceiling tightly. No gap between the ceiling and the wood surface....

13) Now you need to install the correct number of tweeters in each nesting room. The rule of the thumb is to have a minimum of 2 tweeters per square meter (about 10 square feet)and maximum of up to 4 tweeters per square meter. Please do not compromise in the number since the cost of each tweeter is less then RM 3.

14) When you mount the tweeters, you must always make sure that they face the direction where the birds are coming from. If the direction is left, face your tweeters to the left. If they are from the right, face them to the right. Do not make silly mistakes by facing them to the wall, just two feet away.

15) Data room is an important place where you spend most of your time in your birdhouse. For me a room that can provide adequate confort is a must. U see, you might want to visit your birdhouse every other day. However due to strict rules that you are not allowed to enter the nesting areas too often, you can only be in the data room. This is where you keep those sound system running and perhap those screen that shows the action inside. So use your power to make sure the data room is sizable enought.

16) One disadvantage on the tunnel design is the difficulties to keep you house humidity within range. This is due to the large bird entrance holes that comes with the design. What I think that you can do is to have all those ventilation holes be shut to the minimum. The entrance should be placed as low as you can from the ceiling so that the aroma and the humidity are trap on the top part of the house. The house should be air tight.

17) The open roof design allow you to have a huge space where you can place those tweeters. You can actually make you neighbor's birdhouse miserable. You can actually use those bazooka tweeters facing direct to the roof top of your neighbors and play those sexy sound to pull the wild birds to you new house.

18) You need to provide protection to those external tweeters from rain water. Please ensure that the electrical parts do not come into direct contact with water.

As far as I can see, this design is very suitable for a two stories shoplot space.

If you have a new house to be converted you should consider this "TUNNEL" design method.

For more details please call Harry ....