Sabah Can Be A Swiftlet Farming Heaven!!!

I was not surprised with the birdcall tests results conducted in Kudat and Tuaran, Sabah.

At both locations the responds was pretty good and passed my minimum bird count.

Yesterday morning I started my morning trip at about 5.00am and finished my day at 12 mid night.

Early in the morning went to two pieces of lands closed to the tip of Borneo.  One on the steep hillside and the other was at a nice piece of land situated just a few yards away from the sandy beach.

Unfortunately there were only one bird that responded.  I told the owner that the two lands were not at the right location and the one on the steep hillside will have difficulties to ferry those building materials.

On the way back to Tuaran, the owner wanted to collect some durians and the collection point was very closed to the land tested earlier in the morning.  While waiting for the durian transferring from one car to the other I saw a few black spots in the sky.

I quickly got the test unit into operation and within minutes there were more then 50 birds above the car.

I told my client to look up above the car and he was amazed with the instant result.

"Harry where the hell do they came from?"

Well I did two more things to show the land owner how weird the birds behaves.

1) I told them that I can bring the bird down lower and above my head.  Took some branches of those leaves and waved at them.  All came down to me and the land owner was very surprised.

2) I got the car driver to move the car with the gadget in play to move to another location about 100 meters from its original location.  Those bird dashed to the car.  They actually followed the car?

We then shut the birdcall gadget and make our trip to Tuaran.

The rain was not very friendly.  It was quite heavy but I insisted to test since the day before that the test unit failed to operate.  I just wanted to confirm that those birds I saw on that day were indeed facifagus.

Less then 10 seconds we got more then 30 birds hovering about the gadget.  It was raining pretty heavy with about 2 inches of water on the ground and we could not come out of the car.

Before we left the number swelled to about 50.  This was in a heavy rain condition.

We reached KK at about 5.00pm and rest.

After dinner time I received a blog reader who wanted to get to know me.

He confirmed that he have conducted birdcall test in Lahat Datu and the result was positive.  It seem that the number of swiftlet in Sabah in General are increasing healthily.

With  a growing number of BHs being constructed and controlled harvesting in many caves in Sabah, the future is great for all Sabahan.

My gut feeling about swiftlet farming in Sabah is that the state should look at it in a more positive ways.

They should look at it as a potential income earning for the state and their population.

They should come out with a proper plan to turn the state into the most lucrative place to invest in swiftlet farming.

They should support and provide proper incentives for more people to get involved with the very lucrative industries.

Both the upstream and downstream should be looked at.

The best is to encourage the setting up of Swiftlet Eco Park to pull in more foreign investors especially from mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

The current daily flight to Hong Kong should be the link to draw these investors to fly into the state.

Get the "Malaysia as Your Second Home Program"  should be fully utilized to get those investors to come over to buy these swiftlet BHs build in those eco parks.

Try not to kill the industry by threatening those who are currently running those BHs in the state but regulate them.  Find a way to harmonies the situation.

Get them a proper guidelines and give them the appropriate incentives to move their BH to a proper location.

The current locations which they operate can be used as the young birds generator but those eco parks and those in agricultural land will be the new income generating structures for the state.

Try not to close them but help those owners to maintain them to the proper guidelines that can ensure minimum noise pollution, little smell out of them, no mosquito breeding inside, no health hazard and etc.

Make sure they follow the stringent rules and penalize them if they do not follow.

Your main aim is to increase the birds population so that you main plan to turn the state into swiftlet haven is achieved.

Bring in more investors into your beautiful country and use your natural asset to the maximum.......