Saw this distress message from SMC Forum where a birdhouse owner seem to have difficulties in populating his 3 years old house.
His name is Mr Y and got interested in birdhouse farming by accident.
Beside meeting him, there were three other SMC members who turned up to give him a helping hand.
He was very greatfull for our good intentions and gladly arranged for seafood lunch.
My Iteniary:
Sunday Jan 13th, 2008:Started at around 9.30am from Kuala Lumpur to Port Klang, NorthPort.
The trip took me about 45 minutes to reach. Prior to leaving SMS Mr Y, the birdhouse owner, to be there by then.
He was on time and the first thing I asked him to do is to sit down somewhere to fill up a 6 pages quentionaires that I wanted to use in my diagnosis.
Once finished we went up to view the first floor.
Humidity was around 87% and temperature was at 28.9*C.
There were a few nests, not more then 10, but the most glaring was the type of wood used by his consultant as the nesting area. Small in width, less then 4 inches, and about 3/4 inch thick. There were no groove on all the wooden planks.
Corner covers were installed using a diagonal plank with hole at the back.
There were two humidifiers but both were not running.
At the back portion of the nesting areas, the planks show signs of white ants eating away the corner covers plus the nesting wood. It looks very serious and there is a very strong potential that these white ants might attack the roof trusts of the unit.
There are sign that the ants comes via the toilet.
Once we completed the 1st floor, we went up to the 2nd floor looking for more white ants signs and any other problems that were not helping the birds from coming.
White ants were mainly at the back portion but have started to move towards the center of the nesting roof.
There were about 20 full cup nests but there were two strange things that we saw on the floor. 1st there was an egg shell and two dead young birds.
Entered the roving area and observed the entrance hole.
Took plenty of pictures and I am sure these pictures will help a lot with the diagnosis.
There was no hygrostat used for the all four humidifiers (two upstairs and two downstairs). All were connected to a conventional timer.
He just took over from his consultant and has very little ideas what have been done or what to do next???
I believed this was a case where one who have very little knowledge about swiftlet farming and blindly followed the advises given by a so called "Consultant".
Without proper knowledge and deep understanding of swiftlet behaviours, one tend to depend too much on these unscrupolous "Consultant". At the end of the day when they hand over the keys to him, there were so many things that were not right.
We told him that it was an expansive mistakes but there are still time to do something so that the house can be salvaged.
To me it was a sad episode of what can happen to any person who are too excited to get his shoplot converted without doing proper study on how to be a successful swiftlet rancher.
After getting all the necessary informations, one of our SMC member wanted to show his newly build birdhouse. He started the house (switch on the sound system) about three months ago and he complained that there were no sign of birds entering the house.
We decided to have a quick visit. He took more then a year to study on how birdnest should be before designing his own birdhouse. He claimed that he uses no or little help from any Sifu.
The house, I would like to say, was a beautiful work piece of five stars birdhouse hotel. Owesome and fantastic.
Three and a quarter stories high, solid, 35 feet by 70 feet, built on a 2 1/2 acres agricultural land. Each floor was about 15 feet high.
We entered the house and moved to the 3rd floor. We also climbed up to the roof top. It was simply marvelous.
This house to me is one of the well designed unit, with all the necessary features built in to become an ideal birhouse. Each floor the roof were installed with red Meranti with proper grooves, complete with corner covers, the room temperature was at 28*C and humidity was 85.6%.
On the rooftop he built a pool and have a hexagonal tweeter that seem to attract lots of birds to his house.
He also installed a tweeter on the highest nesting floor with external sound playing on it. Something that is recommended by many experienced Sifus.
His only complain: "How come the bird do not enter my house?". Well I reserve my comment but I know he knows why .......
I promised to prepare my visit report to Mr Y and before I left, gave him a few tips inclusive of gifts that he was very happy to have. I am very sure he feel much better then before he met us.
His stress index must have gone down tremendously. The best was that he made new friends who are courageous enought to be there to advise him what he should do to salvage his birdnest house which he dearly wanted to be a successful one.
The visit report will be made available to those who are curious to know the true pictures of this birdhouse and hopefully it will help them to know how to correct those errors. Please send your email to harryswiftlet@yahoo.com ...
