They Need To Be Treated As Those Little Children !!!

Yesterday while waiting for my Firefly plane to arrive I was taken by Rakanwalit to meet a Dato from Tawau, Sabah.

According to Rakanwalit this Dato currently owned a BH that was converted, about 4-5 years ago, from a warehouse.

His BH now produces about 8-9 kg a month.

I was told that he seem to be very experience with swiftlet farming and wanted to organize some seminar himself.

Wow, 8-9 kg a month, and now wanting to organize some seminar. I think his monthly income is enough to stay comfortably.

Anyway I met him and along with his only daughter who seem to be very interested in swiftlet.

Initially I thought I was going to have a good time sharing his experiences and his findings. 

Anyway I answered all his queries and by now I think he knows that I know so many things about swiftlet as if I was once a swiftlet.

I told him that I was a swiftlet in my last life.  Both himself and daughter have a good laugh about that statement.

Well there were a couple of findings that he shared with me:

1) It seem that one of his secret was in using duck egg white to apply onto those walls.  The moment he applied them, those birds will immediately choose the areas nearby to build their nests.

2) There seem to be little different when he change from duck to chicken egg white.  The result seems to be the same.  I told him maybe he should try with ostrich or turtle eggs white.

3) He found out that the nests at an isolated room at the far end of the house, used to be a toilet, seems to produce larger sized nests as compared to the rest.  There is no specific answer to this weir finding but I told him that this might be due to the wet floor at the toilet or perhaps the bird that stays there were bigger then the rest.

4) He never use those conventional 2"X5" piezoelectric tweeters but those 50 cent type tweeters.  I have tried before but it was not giving any satisfactory result.  In his case it was excellent.

5) He have been using those Fendona insecticides and they seems to be keeping those cockroaches at bay.

6) One query that he posted to me was about why those birds are not going down to the lower floor.  The top floor were with more then 500 nests but the bottom was negligible.  Why Pak Harry? My answer was that the entrance hole was not facing the east.  He pondered and realized that the entrance was facing the north.

7) He was not aware about entitlement given to Sabahan swiftlet farmer in getting young birds every year.  Each year they can purchase about 100 young birds at a very low price.  These birds once released in BHs they will come back to stay, not all, as your permanent tenants.


I hope he enjoyed meeting me and he promised to arrange to a Seminar to be held in Tawau soon.