What can you do to prevent those owls from entering your matured BH?
I met a BH owner who's BH was somewhere closed to Kenyir Lake in Trengganu, Malaysia.
We touched on many interesting subject matters but among the many I was attracted on the way he solved his BH from being attacked by those owls.
According to him his BH before the attack has more then 600 nests and growing at a fairly good rate (10+% a month).
His luck stop when an owl family came to stay inside his BH.
They actually breed inside his BH. The moment they started to feed their chicks the number of swiftlet inside the house dropped to about 100 plus nests. More than 2/3 of those nests were emptied and no new birds dares to enter the BH.
It was devastating and he nearly wanted to give up the swiftlet venture business.
After capturing and removal of the predators he opt to use those fishing strings to be lined about 9 inches apart.
That according to him prevent any more interference from those wild owls.
Than again when I was in Chaah, Johor, another person I met spoke about his owls problems too.
He knew about using those fishing string but after installation he came to realize that those owl have the ability to open the tying knots. He now changed those strings to steel wires.
I was very sure that after the replacement from nylon fishing string to steel wires those owl were not able to untie those knots any longer.
When I did the BH inspection in Setiawan, a BH with about 305 nests, I saw the use of steel wires at the entrance hole.
The wires were about 8-10 inches apart. What the owner did was to have the gaps bigger (10 inches) on the upper part while the lower part he make it smaller (8 inches).
While observing the hole I can see that those swiftlet have little problem to fly in and out of the hole.
Most of them enter using the upper part of the hole.
This is something that you might want to use to prevent those big birds from entering your BH especially those on agricultural lands.
No comments:
Post a Comment