SP BH revamp operation !!!

After completing the revamping operation of Kulim BH I took my workers up to Sungai Patani, Kedah BH.

This BH have been dead for some time due to electricity wiring.

Due to some shorting in the cables it tripped everytime the amplifier is put into playing mode.

I could not understand the right reason.

I was blaming the old tweeters but I was completely wrong.

My worker discovered some broken wires that were touching each other and coursing short circuit.

The two floors were remodeled where the VIP room was widened.

New crossing woods were installed and new cluster tweeters were installed.

The most interesting was the installation of the last tango sound system and those new tweeters at the three entrance holes.

I also installed at hexagonal tweeter on the monkey house, at the back part.

Just look at what happened during the test run,

Kulim BH Birds Entering the Main Entrance Hole !!!

This is the outcome after my hard work.

Frankly my legs cramp after climbing the four plus one stories staircases.

But it was sweet.

Sweet when you put those smiles back to the owners face.

I am truely glad for what I did.

Kulim BH: At Last I Got The BH Back To Its Normal Self !!!

I took 16 days to complete the revamp operation and now it is running to my expectation.

Remember this BH was four stories high and each floor was about 25 feet wide by 80 feet long.

It was infected with fungus and I estimated about 1 out of six planks were severely affected.

The bad one were replaced with new planks while those that were not that bad were cleaned using Tanali Vinegar.

The monkey house was my main target.

The small sized entrance hole was widen to 3 feet wide by 4 feet high.

Two poles tweeters with 4 pieces of 2"x5" tweeters were fixed on each window frame.

In addition I install two more on the top frame.

I was very firmed about the installation of hexagonal tweeter just above the main entrance hole.

The owner suggested to deploy two long range Bazooka tweeters.

I did delivered and installed the two on the monkey house rooftop.

To make it exciting I installed 8 power tweeters around the monkey house roof areas.

They became my last tango sound system.

The tunnel inside the monkey house was installed with three sets of external sound tweeters to draw any bird that enter the monkey house to fly down to the lowest floor.

I think all went as per my plan.

Each nesting room have at least one VIP room.

I am so obsessed with how to get those birds to quickly adopt the BH.

The nesting planks inside the VIP rooms were properly installed with additional crossings (two lines) and randomly every crossing were installed with cluster tweeters.

I took a lot of trouble to personally install those fake nests on the nesting planks and tweeters.

The owner seems to be very happy with the impeccable workmanship.

Every evening when I was at site we set down counting the number of birds entering the main entrance hole.

"Pak Harry, in my more than two years sitting and counting those birds entering I have never seen this many after your revamp my BH." he was trying to be polite.

I did the best for him and I hope he will have many birds staying as his permanent tenant in the shortest possible time.

 

  

  

  

  

 

Should Your Play The Pooling Sound ???

I met a newbie who owned a BH with little nests after two years into operation.

His assessment on why his nests numbers were little are as follows:

1) The first year it could be due to the strong cement smell.
   
He did very little to remove the cement smell

2) The second year he suspected that it was due to playing the pooling sound on his monkey house roof.
     He uses three sounds, the internal, the external and the pooling sound.
     This was preached by his Sifu after attending his seminar at Holiday Villa.

According to him the pooling sound was playing havoc since those birds gathered above his monkey house areas but refuse to enter his entrance hole.

After having a long though he swabbed the pooling sound as his external sound.

Let see what happened next. I think they now begin to come to the entrance hole and entering the monkey house.

This was when I met him to view his video clip showing how many birds were hovering above his BH.

Well he might have many other problems inside his BH.

I told him that with very limited knowledge about swiftlet farming he might face a very similar issues in getting those birds to built their nests.

The best is to get someone experience to inspect his BH and perhaps inform all the possible things that he can do to improve his chances.

One important issue was how to align his external sound tweeters to pull those wild birds to fly not only into the monkey house but right to the back of his nesting room.

There is no use of getting them into the monkey house but they never fly into his nesting rooms.

Since he just swabbed the pooling sound as his external sound he wanted to observe what happened next.

I fully agree with his to give the house a short period of observation see if the nest number will start to increase.

If they remain the same or very little improvement he should get someone to visit an pinpoint any thing wrong inside.

It was nice to meet someone who claimed to be a very passionate swiftlet farmer.

I look forward to visit his BH in the future.

The Heavy Rain Is Causing Havoc In Many BHs !!!

The last one week headlines in most local newspapers were all about the flood in many states in Peninsular Malaysia.

The worst seems to be in Trengganu and Pahang.

I wonder if they are affecting those BHs.

The one in Karak have called to complain about water flooding on the floor due to leaking roof and water entering the ventilation holes.

There are lots of water on the floor and the walls.

This is not a very good news because the rain will continue to pour for at least one or two months.

The owner of Cennih BH indicated that his BH is under at least 3-5 feet of water.

He has not inspect his BH damage since the road leading to his BH is totally covered with water.

Another BH owner whose BHs are in Ayih Putih Kemaman said nearly the same thing.

Harry I cannot even reach my BH with my 4X4 wheel maybe by boat.

This are some messages from a few BH owners.

I wonder if those birds are affected.

Once the area is badly flooded and little insects are produced the food supply problem will crops.

One bad thing that will happen during this flooding period is to watch out for baby birds crawling out of their nests and drop down to the floor.

It happen before in Dungun.

A BH owner called and asked me about why there are so many young birds on in BH floors.

I did not know about the bad flood happened in his area.

At first I though it was due to those gackos but he disagreed with my prediction.

After more questions and answers we finally found out that his area have been under severe flood for almost one weeks plus.

Once the food supply is short the feeding of these young birds will stop.

After about three days without food they will be so hungry that they will crawl out of their nests and fall to the floor.

There is very little thing that you can do but to keep your finger cross for the water to reside.

Maybe, just maybe those BHs who operate their insect generating system will stand a better chance.

Well check your BH for any signs of those young birds on the floor.

Something That I Wanted To Share About Running External Sound on 24 Hrs !!!

 

(The largest chandelier tweeters ever seen)

I wrote this special article about the effects of running external sound on a 24 hours basis recently.

So far three readers wrote to me about their experiences.

The three stories were one from Vietnam, Pasir Putih Kelantan and from Raub Pahang.

The BH owner in Pahang is a proud owner of a BH with 3000 birds inside with about 800+++ nests.

His report was something like this:

" Hi sifu, read your blog about running the external sound for 24 hours.  My BH have been running the external sound from the beginning till now, 3 years and 2 months.  Now the birds staying is around 3000.  Nests is 80 +++.  What do you think about it. TQ"

He seems to carry out the experiment either intentionally or unintentionally.

The good thing that happened to his BH is that the number of birds staying after three years is about 3000 or 1000 birds a year.

This must be dues to the external sound he played for 24 hours, according to him.

But what I am a bit concerned about is the number of nests inside which is only 800 plus plus.

If there are 3000 birds staying how come the number of nests is only 800 plus plus?

It should be at least 1200 to 1500 nests, right?

Could it be because of the external sound running for 24 hours?

Something is not right and we need some kind of reasons why and how to push those ungrateful tenants to quickly erect their nests.

My personal view, which might not be 100% right, those ungrateful swiftlet might have problem with the external sound.

They might have intoxicated with the external sound until they refuse to find a mate.

What I wanted to suggest to the BH owner is to lower the external sound volume playing at night and at the same time increase the internal sound volume (at night time).

Now let me share with you this report from Pasih Putih, Kelantan.

Remember this BH which I was asked to inspect last month?

One unusual method adopted by the owner was to play his external sound on 24 hours basis.

He installed at least 20-40 tweeters per floor dedicated to external sound playing.

I told him that this might be wrong and I suggested to him about adopting a new method.

Currently he run his internal sound on two hours on and two hours off.

I mean he uses two sets of amplifiers for his internal sound.

In cooling the amplifiers he set the auto setting to change every two hours.

This would mean each amplifier will run six time two hours or 12 hours a day.

What I told him to do was to change the method to run on 13 hours and 11 hours rotation.

What is important was to run the night time sound at a higher volume while during the daytime his internal sound should be lower.

He never thought about this new method and he asked me why.

My explaination to him was something like this:

If your external sound is off say at 8:00 pm your new tenants will be at a kind of lost.

Hey how come my favorite sound is dead? After hanging around at the external sound tweeters he or she will have three choices.

1) To stay put at the dead tweeters.  This will not happened.  After about 10-15 minutes with no sound at the external tweeter they will opt to the next or the next point.

2) They will fly out of your BH.  This will be a big loss to you effort to lure them in.

3) They will shift their location to your internal sound playing tweeters.  This is what you wanted most of them to do.  Remember the internal sound will be the sound that will urged them to mate and built those nests.

So I told him to run the internal sound at a louder sound volume about 15 minutes before the external sound stop.  In this particular case at 7:45 pm.

He did what I asked him to do and this was his sms message:

"Pak Harry (PH), I refer to your blog today ... I waited until my BH external sound stop at 8:00 pm tonight. After 15 minutes not a single birds rush out of my BH.  Your philosophy is always right."


I am not very sure to accept his compliment but I think I have proven that the technique I recommended make sense.

But what about this interesting story from Vietnam?

This was some of the messages received from Dat.

"Pak Harry, I just read your new post about external sound.  Yes some external sound could be used during night time. One of my customer has a very strange phenomena. When he stopped the external sound all his birds starts flying out. Even the internal sound used was your famous SuperBabyKing."

"Then he asked me if he can try to play external sound of a 24 hours basis or not.  I recommended your external sound Super 208 for a trial run. Yes after doing so he succeeded in stopping those birds from flying out."

I asked how old was the BH and how many birds was he talking about.

His answer was : a new BH with about 50 birds.

He also know that some external sound if played for 24 hours will make those birds become crazy like the "Black Cloud".

I am pleased with his quick action to help the new BH owner.

Those birds stop flying out after the external sound were tuned to run on 24 hours basis.

The next issue will be: will they built those nests ?

I asked him to monitor the situation closely and report back to me for result.

The three stories above have some kind of lesson that we can learn or experiment.

Running external sound on 24 hours basis is not new but no one have research their effect on nests building.

How I wish more researches be carry out to investigate on this matter.

For now I wanted to install the 24 hours external sound running on two of the four floors at Kulim BH.

Already spoken to the BH owner and he agreed to my proposal.

If the experiment show good result we shall run all the four floors on a 24 hours basis.

If the result is negative we shall stop the 24 hours sound at 8:45 pm.

Latest News About A BH Using Super Pheromone Located In Brunei !!!

This was the latest message received from a Brunei BH owner who applied Super Pheromone inside his BH:

"Greeting Mr Harry,
I just wanna update to you.  I am amaze on your finding.. seem like the super pheromone doing its magic.. yesterday I visited my BH...counted the bird nests... Amazing more than 70 full nests and many more new markings.. I guess my tenants had push up to more than 200 birds..."

A very encouraging message and this shows that the Super Pheromone is well accepted by those swiftlet species found in Brunei.

Those of you who owned BH(s) in Brunei can now use the Super Pheromone with little problem of its effectiveness.

If you wish to contact the Brunei BH owner who SMS his BH report to me let me know.

I am sure he will be very happy to talk to you about his experiences.

Enjoy the attached clip that he whatssup to me:

Fungus Issue In Karangan,Kulim BH!!!

 

(Badly affected nesting planks)

Sorry for not writing any new article for the past few days.

To those who called asking for my reasons please be inform that due to the death of my father in law I stop writing to be with my wife family during the one week funeral.

 Okay let start the day about fungus problem found inside Kulim BH:


Among the many issues found inside this BH located in Karangan Kulim was those thick fungus attack on nesting planks.

These affected planks if not remove or treated will cause the BH to be less preferred by those swiftlet.

Those thick fungus will usually attack more planks and cases the BH to be filled with spores (dust).

My first task was to remove and replace the affected planks with new wood.

Those that can be cleaned or treated were taken care of.

I took about four days to locate a suitable nesting planks supplier and finally found a sawmill at Bakar Arang Industrial Estate, Sungai Patani, Kedah.

The price per foot was a bit on the high side but I was very satisfied with the planks quality.

I bought about 1200 feet long of the planks and my boys managed to install all of it during the revamp operation.

Those affected nesting planks that were not very serious were cleaned using Tanali vinegar mixed with plain water.

The method used was to apply a layer of the Tanali onto the affected areas and brush the part with hard wire brush.

Once completed another layer of the Tanali was applied on those spot.

So far the treated areas looks cleaned and the wood surface transformed to its original looks.

The BH owner on a few occasions could not recognized those planks that were cleaned with Tanali vinegar.

The BH now looks much cleaner and hopefully those fungus will stay away from this BH.

I also sprayed the BH floor and walls with Tanali vinegar mixed with water.

The whole house was having a very thick smell due to those fermented pineapple insect breeding slurries.

My main purpose is to perhaps kill those spores from flying around and landed on those planks.

The BH humidity especially on the lowest floor was a bit on the high side and I recommended the use of exhaust fan to stabilize it.

Fungus On Those Nesting Planks !!!

 

Have you ever experience your BH nesting planks being attacked by those fungus?

Just have a good look at these pictures and just let me know how do you clear them.

My Father In Law Passed Away !!!

Sorry for not writing any article for the past few days.

My father in law passed away and was attending his 7 days funeral.

Will start writing some thing interesting tonight.

It will be something about a BH with so many nesting planks with fungus.

A Delima How To Reply To A Simple Question !!!

"Pak Harry can I run my external sound on a 24 hours basis?" this was the latest question that makes me feel very difficult to answer.

What bothered me was what I say in Pasir Putih BH recently.

The owner invited me to visit his bh and looking forward for my long report.

What I say in this BH makes me wonder if external sound should be run on 24 hours or not.

The background of this BH owner on swiftlet farming is almost zero.

By shear luck he build his own design BH and he operated his BH with both external and internal sound ran on 24 hours basis.

The external sound uses two amplifiers.

One running during the day time up to 8:00pm and the second will run during night shift up to 7:00am.

During the daytime the external sound runs both those tweeters located at the entrance hole and the tunnel plus those installed inside his nesting rooms but at night only those tweeters inside will run the whole night.

The number of nests he collected was 78 pieces.

If you think that the external sound will make them crazy, how come they still erect those 78 nests?

Hmmm... I wonder if we should conduct some research on this externals sound playing arrangements.

Before this story crops up I remember talking to another BH owner from Dungun Trengganu.

He experience something similar.

He describe about his strange doings and I asked him to stop the external sound at night.

After just one week he called and said that the number of birds began to reduce.

"Pak Harry the number of birds entering my BH after stopping the night time external sound playing seems to reduce.  What should I do now?" he asked.

Hmm  something that I did not expected.

I gracefully asked him to reinstall the old method.

The next day he reconnect the cable and immediately those birds number started to climb.

A very strange thing and I begin to wonder if I should adopt this new method.

I finally replied to the first guy who asked about this to go ahead but keep me inform if their is any changes occur.

I hope those of your who happened to run your BH with the external sound runs on 24 hrs please write to me about your experiences.

Your feed back will be very useful for other BH owners.

Write to harryswiftlet@yahoo.com or sms to 0177551318.

Sekinchan Swiftlet Are Responding Well To My Super Pheromone !!!

Remember the recent Sekinchan BH which I inspected?

The owner called two days ago and ordered 5 liters of the super pheromone liquid.

At first he wanted two bottles but I told him not to rush.

I visited his BH about a week ago and during the first meeting I brought two canisters.

I told him to try first.

If it works than you move to the second phase.

Well he tried and he love the results so far.

The number of fresh bird shits on his BH floor jumped dramatically.

Suddenly those old nests and dead markings come to life.

He showed me those fresh markings today and I can see the wide smile on his face.

"Yes Pak Harry, they are crazy with your super pheromone.  Just one week the number of new markings short up to nearly 20-30 spots."

Hmm now I know why he was chasing for the 5 liters bottle.

He have yet to complete the revamp operation.

From the look of it I told him that he have done a good job.

Once finished I am sure he will see more nests inside the VIP rooms.

I hope I can drop by to view his progress and report to all who read my blog.

What I like most is that the swiftlet specie found in Sekinchan are attracted to the super pheromone smell.

This attraction will be a plus point to his revamp operation.

Those who have yet to try my super pheromone please try to call as soon as you can.

Call 017 7551318,

PS: Today delivered a canister to another BH owner in Miri Sarawak. I will closely monitor his BH progress once he apply the liquid.

Another Perfect Prediction !!!

I am getting better and better everyday.

My prediction is getting more accurate as time goes by.

For this particular case was something like this.

I was in front of my computer and suddenly there was a BH owner who wanted to ask some question.

"Pak Harry I wonder if BH should be with partitions." his first question.

I tried not to make him scared and told him that it is a difficult question but from my observation those with partitions do better.

"Why." he was curious.

Well this is due to a much darker condition inside.  If you create a room at the back of your nesting room most birds will stay inside this room.

Most old BHs are without this type.

"But my BH birds stays in front of my 2nd floor which is brighter than the most.  I don't understand why?" he is getting more confused.

I know why his birds stays at the front area.

Can you tell me which side is your main entrance window is facing? West or east? Must me WEST?  I predicted.

His immediate answer was: WEST.

See I predicted west and he replied west.

Now he begin to ask more "WHY?".

This is one very good reason why I keep telling BH owners to try to learn as much as you can about swiftlet.

If your main entrance hole faces the west, your BH tenant will have problem to find their way out of the nesting room in the morning.

Remember swiftlet need morning light to guide them out of your BH in the morning.

If your main entrance hole is facing the west they will locate the best place to be in your BH.

In this case they will stay near to the entrance hole area.

If you do nothing you will have a big challenge to populate your BH.

Try to open another hole facing the east if you can.