A DIY BH with Some Unique Problems !!!

"Pak Harry, I did nearly everything that I know but they simply refused to enter and stay in my more then 6 months old BH."

This was something that is common among many who are not well versed with the birds characteristics.

The owner never attended any swiftlet farming Seminar, never read any book and what he did was to visit a few BH and come up with his special design.

He did mentioned he got a "Sifu" from a neighboring state who copied my Black Cloud sound and gave to him foc.

Externally the design looks flawless but once you come near to check the way he set those tweeters and internal fixtures you know why those birds are not entering and staying.

The moment I arrived I took a good look around the BH.

The owner seems to be very concerned over the sun rays entering his BH.  He nearly covered the entrance hole in total. Yes look at the pictures posted on this page and try to imagine if you are a swiftlet flying above the BH.

He forgot that those birds are flying from the top down and how the hell they can find the entrance hole to enter the BH?

The next was the external tweeters placement at the entrance window.

All the tweeters were on the wall around the perimeter but not on the frame. These placements were worse than the arrangements I saw in Beaufort, Sabah BH (my next article).

The birds will only play at the window and have very little interest to enter the hole.

 I told him to rearranged all the four external sound tweeters positioning to a more precised on the window perimeter.

My next observation was how those amplifiers were set.

You can easily judge how good are those so called "Sifu" by looking at how they set those amplifiers especially those equalizers setting, the base knob, the treble and the mid.

They were all wrongly set and I adjusted to the way they should be.

The key issue here is that if the "Sifu" don't even know the simple basic how can he be able to judge those more complicated issues inside the BH?

How about the type of sounds used to pull those birds inside and get them to stay?

Internally I can see that this BH owner is at a loss on how to make his nesting rooms dark enough.

His biggest problem is how to know that his BH is dark enough?

My answer to him is simple.  Get your worker to stand two feet away from you and check if you can see his face. If you can see his face or kick a ball into those VIP rooms than you need to do something to block those light.

One big mistake that make his too bright was when he used those thin white colored 4" PVC pipe at those ventilation holes.

Just imagine each of them become a light bulb with 10 watts.

He now covered all of them with those black plastic covers.

One very interesting observation were those bird shit spots found on the floor.

It seems the owner indicated that initially when he put the BH into operation there were at least 10 -20 birds entered and stays.  However during one of his visit he forgot to shut the light in the BH for more than 1 week and all of them were gone.

My observation was where precisely those birds stayed during the early period.  Yes they were located below those cluster tweeters (4 tweeters at nesting plank crossing).

This proved to my theory that the more you install them the more you will get those tenant inside. Try to get as many cluster tweeters as possible in your BH VIP room(s).

I completed a 17 pages report just the possible steps to get the BH back to operation.

I just wish he will follow my recommendations.