A Very Dry BH !!!

During the weekend I visited a number of BHs and help more than 3 BH owners with their specific problems.

The first owned a printing shop.

The moment I entered his first BH I told him that the smell from those rotting bird shit was strong.

"Your BH must be quite old and there must be lots of birds inside?"

Yes Pak Harry and I have the top floors (two units side by side) unit up since 2004.  Than in 2005 expanded to the 1st floors (two units too).

Total number of nests so far is about 1,200 plus and most of them are at the upper floors.  They are not coming down.

"So why am I here for?"

I need your advise on how to pull them downstairs and how to increase the number of nests from just 1,200 nests.

I took some time to investigate what can be the reasons why those birds prefer to stay upstairs .  At the same time survey the possible reasons why the nests numbers are stagnant.

One key reason why those birds are not coming down to the lower floor was that he did nothing to pull them to the lower floor.

My advise to him was to install at least 4-6 additional tweeters at the entrance areas to pull those birds to the lower floor.

If he wanted to get more, perhaps he should stop operating any external sound tweeters on the upper floor inclusive of the entrance doors to it.

He might want to install a few chandelier tweeters at the lower floor running with external sound. Two to 4 units will be good enough.

One very interesting observation made on the upper floor was a VIP room that was erected by chance.

The room works well and nearly a third of the nests were inside this room.

Yes, my point is clear i.e. VIP rooms do works.  Give yourself a try.

The issue on why the nests were not multiplying have something to do with the room's humidity.

I was very sure that the nests were with lots of cracks and during my inspection there was a young bird that got her leg trapped at one of the cracked hole. (See video clip above).

I took sometime to climb and tear the nest to release the leg.  She was lucky and I save her life.

Most of the nests were with a line of crack about 1-2 mm in size.  Some of the nests were coming out of the nesting plank thus creating a gap of about 4-5 mm size.  This is not a good sign.

If those bird recycle and do not cover the gap, they will have a missing egg syndrome.  Their eggs will drop down via the gap.

My point to him was to find ways and means to increase the room humidity and perhaps make the floor wet.

Be careful not to spray the mist towards the ceiling for it will cause fungus to grow on them.

Make sure when you apply the wet floor the water will not leak to other rooms or lower floor.

Try in one of the room, I prefer the VIP room.

The next issue was his recent clearing of bird shit out of the BH.

What I advise him to do was to either harvest them on those plastic mat and move to another location in the same house or put them into those containers but try not to remove the old shit unless the BH is fulled with those nests.

If the BH is totally full of nests than the removal is okay. Partial removal is recommended but not total removal.

If you remove them it will cause a kind of stress to those birds.  This is against the GAHP (Good Animal Husbandry Practices).

In case those local authorities wanted to visit your BH try to figure out how to remove these shit temporarily.

Once those visitors are gone, place them beck in accordance to where the shit containers came from.

Most local authority will not understand the bird's behaviors.

They prefer to have the floor cleaned and tidy because they think like human and not like those birds.

Remember a BH is erected for those birds and not for human.

You need to provide what those birds love to have inside their BH and not like what human wanted it to be.

If you need to apply those insecticide please do so but use the odorless type to kill those bugs , cockroaches and beetles.