A New Type Of Monkey House Called "Harry'sDevil" !!!

I must admit that I am one those guys who wanted to see some changes in the way that BHs are being build and maintained.

However any new changes must have a kind of solid reasons why they are needed and eventually will helps the BH owner to harvest more nests.

This article is something you might want to read or copy into you memory bank.  I am not sure if this special idea has been implemented.  So far I have not seen any.

My story goes like this:

When we bring up a topic about "Monkey House" or "Dog Kennel" or "Jack Roof" we tend to visualized of a special diagram of an elevated box above the BH roof with at least one entrance hole.

Normally it looks something like this:

The box dimensions varies and the entrance hole is in the middle of it.

We then understand that the birds needs a 4 meters by 4 meters to rove around.  This is very important during their mating period when those males will be chasing the female. If the box is to small the only path inside the house is down.  They cannot fly to the right or left.  If they do so they will hit the walls.

So we extend the dimension to a minimum of 4 meters by 4 meters.

Well then again we were informed that if we observed that they fly in an anticlockwise direction (normally yes), during bird call test, we need to ensure that the entrance hole is to the right side of the wall an not in the middle.

If they take the clock wise then you need to move the hole to the left of the wall.

For anti clock wise flying path it will now looks like this with an additional entrance hole at the back wall diagonally (double clicks on the diagram):

So I thought this is it.  This looks good and I am of the opinion that those swiftlet will love to enter the two holes, rove in the box , then they will fly down into the roving room and finally into those VIP rooms.

Then suddenly I saw something unusual and it happened during my recent trip to Kuantan, Pahang.

The BH I was talking about was a cannibalized unit where the owner refuse to extend the tenant's rental.
period.

This BH was with about 106 nests markings on the nesting planks.  The floor was full of bird shits and the aroma from these decaying shits were extremely nice, to me (indicating a matured BH).

When moving out, the tenant in actual fact not only removed all the sound systems, tweeters and so forth but he practically destroyed/damaged the monkey house on the roof top.

They wanted to remove the monkey house but what they did was just breaking a few walls of the monkey house and left the structure up there allowing those birds to still enter the BH.

They should have seal all those holes not to allow not a single birds to enter the nesting areas. Very very stupid la !!!!

During my visit, due to heavy rain, I managed to visit the unit and decided not to enter.  My reason being there were too many birds inside and it better not to scares them. We managed to open the main door and we saw so many birds inside the house.

I then decided to observe from the ground floor and see how they enter and leave the monkey house.

What intrigue me was the way they enter and leave the monkey house box.

When they flew in they love the top entrance holes.

However when they flew out they took the nearest holes that were closed to their flying out path.  Yes they flew out at the bottom holes that was broken by the ex tenant.

So why don't we include these exit holes at the bottom part of the monkey house walls?

Now the design will look something like this (double clicks on the diagram):

I called this design as "Harry'sDevil"

You might want to consider this idea but I do not provide any guarantees that the birds will love your BH.

The idea is to provide them with the more exit holes so that they can fly out faster and more swiftlet can exit at one time.

The size of these four additional holes will be around 22 inches by 9 inches.  This will be enough for two birds to fly out concurrently but small enough not to allow too much light into the tunnel. Remember on the average the tip to tip length of their wings is about 10 inches.  The size, I believed, is small enough to prevent those owls from entering?

These four new holes will not be provided with any tweeters.  They are for the birds to fly out and not coming in.

The two on the right hand side just below the hexagonal tweeters shall be installed with external sound tweeters.

I hope you get the picture.

If you have in mind to use the design and need more clarification please call 017 755 1318.

Every month there will be some new discoveries.

I love my creativity and it is very nice to share with all of my blog readers.