Exhausted After a 12 Hours Marathon !!!

I was dead tired after standing up for more then 12 hours in front of a packed house of participants for my August Swiftlet Farming Seminar.

My leg calf muscle cramped and it hurt a bit. I hit the sack at about 10:00 pm. Very rare I sleep before 12:00am

My wife suggested  to perhaps use a high chair the next time. Make sure there is a glass of water too.

Yesterday Seminar was unusual.  The number of participants was more then 35 person.  Beside males there were also 4 females.

A good numbers were from Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore.

I started with welcoming all participants and assured them that they will be a new person after the one day talk.

Then I started with : Basic BH Design for Beginners.

My idea was to stress to them about the importance on the three compartment in a BH, the entrance area, the roving and the nesting.  Each have their specific functions and the way they are design must be precised.

The minimum size must be adhered to or else the birds will hurt themselves. Main reason being when they rush home at high speed they tend to knock the walls and injured themselves.  The chances to survive being sick or injured in the animal kingdom is slimmed.  You need to ensure that you provide adequate roving room size to minimize or prevent any possibilities of those birds hurting themselves.

The next paper was about How To Create The VIP Room.

This seem to be something new to all the participants.  I confessed to them that I came out with the word "VIP room" about two years ago after a couple of visits to those BHs with rooms at the back part of their BHs.  It seem that those swiftlet love to hide at the back room rather then in the main hall.

With my other observations I push the idea that VIP room can be the prefer nesting location if we install some additional gadgets inside it.  This includes those tweeters, fake nests, bird shits on the floor, externals sound tweeters and so forth.  Everybody was fascinated with my findings and sincere recommendations.

The third and fourth topic were more interesting.

I have this notion that swiftlet farming must be with objective and a kind of target date to achieve your dream.  My idea was to split the farming into two phases.  The first phase and the second phase.

The first phase is when you are totally dependent on your neighbors to provide you BH with their young chicks and Phase 2 once you have adequate nests to be self sufficient. The word self sufficient is something like you can generate you own baby birds internally when the number of nest is high enough.

I stressed to my Seminar Participants that Swiftlet Farming is something similar to planning your way to  becoming a Millionaire.  If you want to be a millionaire you need to get your first million and after that the next will be much easier.  You need to set a time line when the 1st million will be in your bank account.

In Swiftlet Farming you do more or less the same.

Set a target, say 300 nests by year 2012 (two years), and work towards that.  Do everything that will bring the 300 nests in and put aside the value of those nests for a moment.  Provide those wild birds with what they prefer and let them populate your BH to the max.

Once your target number is achieved you now should move to the Phase 2. 

Phase 2 can be more exciting.  Now your BH already have 300 nests and each nest can generate at least 2 young birds time three cycle a year (on the average).  So you now have 1,800 young chicks to handle.  Can you make 30% of the 1,800 to stay in your BH?

How about finding a way to increase the total young chicks to say 3,000 a year?

Can you adopt the Translocation Technique?

What about applying Force Harvesting? Where to send those young chicks?

Try to increase the number of young birds more then 1,800.  How to do that?

Can we increase the number of the female baby birds more then the male?

I make those participants stick to their seats for the entire period and I am glad that they enjoyed listening to my talks with lots of things to laugh about.

We took off to Kampung Jawa for an insect generating barn visit at 3.00pm.  It was drizzling and luckily it stop just before we arrived.  I rented a 44 seats bus for this 1 hours visit.

The owner of the barn was kind enough to show us how he applied those soya beans powder, tempung gandum, yellow mee, minerals, vitamins and etc.  He also open his barn for inspection.  Wow a very interesting ideas.

We rushed back to the seminar room to wrap up two more topics.  One about the soundless humidifier and the other was about sounds.

I played the Marvelous Cloud, Lady Gaga, Black Cloud, Babyking and Super Jerantut for them to listen too.

All were amused and happy to know that there is a place to buy good sounds.

I wrapped up the Seminar with questions and answers time before dispersing.  I am glad that every person that I spoke too were happy with what they learn during that day.

Some wanted to come back for the October 2nd Seminar.

If you have not attended any Seminar before just try one.  Be my next participants and you will never regret.

My main aim was to part with my knowledge and not to sell products, I told them.