One of the advantage in being a popular swiftlet blogger is that I can enter many BHs that can be old, new, healthy or sick.
The owner will either engage me to come over to investigate the health of their BH or even wanted me to show new things that they did with their BH.
To me I feel honoured for every door opened for me to enter these BHs.
Every BH have its own uniqueness or weired things that those birds will construct their nests.
I have seen many strange behaviours and some of them were pretty recent.
This happened in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.
This special BH was in KK town areas and the number of nest population increased by at least 300% within less then 5 months after my last visit in late November last year.
What I know was that the owner applied my method of playing those BC, tongkat ali and godsend during the happy hours.
That might be one of the possible reasons for such a drastic jump in the nest population.
The birds occupied only the top most floor and refuse to occupy the lower floors.
I advised the owner about the problems with the LAL and perhaps remove the steel staircase blocking the flying path. The orientation of the external sound tweeters were all wrong. The best is to re orientate those external sound tweeters so that they face upward, preferably towards the top floor LAL.
One interesting observation was how those swiftlets use anything that protrude on the walls and the nesting planks.
In normal circumstances I encourage BH owners to install as many fake nests as possible so that you can accelerate the nest population. Once they nests population reaches say 300, you can then remove all these fake nest and let the birds build their nests on the nesting planks.
Inside this KK BH I saw three nests on the cement walls.
One was like this:
The bird build their nest on a broken electrical junction box. Let us ask why? The owner of this BH installed those red meranti wood and yet this particular couple have their own agenda. They choose a broken junction box on the cement wall.
How about these two pictures also a nest on the cement wall:
If you inspect carefully the two nests rest on a small crack on the wall painting. If I am not mistaken the spot was chosen because of those protrusions on the wall due to those paint crack lines.
Then I saw another interesting nest:
The couple build their nest on a piece of left over steel clamp used to hole those cable or pipe onto the wall. I believed this piece of metal was accidentally left during the preparation of the house and now the birds chooses to build their nest on it.
Now let us try to analyse why such behaviours are very important to us.
Front this observation we can conclude that these wild birds do prefer to build their nest on any wall as long as there is a small protrusion while enable them to easily cling on them.
I remember telling about a study conducted in Thailand where the same conclusion were made. The cave dwelling swiftlet do fight for those crevices or protrusion on the cave walls to build their nest.
This is the reason why I subscribed to the installation of as many fake nests as possible during the phase 1 of your BH.
Maybe from today you might want to extend the fake nests (Styrofoam cuttings) onto the walls too?
Why not? If they love to build on these protrusions then let them have them.
Once they have chosen your new BH as their home you will be laughing to the bank.
Remember every new nest build in your BH will push your asset value by 1,000RM !!!
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