While my two workers were busy finish the second floor at Salak Tinggi, I took a 4 hours drive to Kemaman, Trengganu.
It was just must usual response to a BH owner with some sort of problems with his stand alone BH.
My mission was to carry out a detail inspection and once that was done I was required to submit my views and recommendations to reactivate it.
After meeting the owner in Kemaman I was taken for a 10 kilometers drive out of town.
This BH was a stand alone located on an agricultural land surrounded by Palm Oil plantation.
There were two units back to back but my mission was to tackle the old unit with about 60 nests after 1.5 years into operation.
The owner erected the BH based on his knowledge by reading some books and the internet.
"Pak Harry, no matter how much you learned from those books but with little practical experiences you will not be able to get the desired results. That was why I called you since you have a much better hands on experiences."
His complains were as follows:
1) Every morning the sky will be thousands of swiftlet flying above and around the area.
2) After putting his DIY BH into operation in February 2012, the number of nests he managed to obtained was 60.
3) The number of birds entering was 188 (last count about a few days ago).
4) He cannot pin point what is wrong with his BH. He knew that there were a few things that is causing those birds not wanting to enter and stays but his lack of experiences in swiftlet farming is not strong enough to locate those problems.
After listening to his BH stories and lack of practical knowledge I entered the BH.
My 45 minutes inspection was as follows:
a) Yes the number of birds entering the BH seems to be plenty. This was easily traced by the huge numbers of bird shit markings on the roving room walls. There were a couple of thousands of those markings.
b) His lack of experience seems to be the core reason why the number of nests were too little. The biggest flaws was on the nesting room darkness. The bright light from both the entrance window plus those coming from the 4" diameter ventilation holes were not properly controlled and reduced.
c) I showed him where most of those nests were located. They were all very closed to those internal sound tweeters. I challenged him to count the number of tweeters and compared with the number of nests, they were almost equal in number. Why don't you increase the number of internal sound tweeters?
d) I also highlighted this interesting observations. He installed about 20 fake nests and nearly all were tenanted. Why don't you installed more?
e) The upper floor nesting room temperature was a bit high. He wanted my expertise to insulate the walls using those bubble heat shield. I agree with him in total.
f) The internal sound used was not very proper, I told him. The sound was mainly those young baby birds cries. I prefer the one that was more to the Babyking sound.
g) The main entrance hole positions and the hexagonal tweeter needs to be repositioned.
h) The roof above the entrance hole was a bit too long. I insisted that it should be reduced to about 10 inches long. Current is about 2.5 feet long.
i) I was not impressed with the number of external sound tweeters inside the nesting room and the path from the roving to the nesting room. Too little and he need to boost the number using power tweeters and chocolate tweeters.
j) The BH humidity was using this water pump that pushed those water to a set of mist spray. A number of those nozzles were not functioning.
k) Nearly all the ventilation holes were without any extension pipe to reduce the light pollution inside the nesting rooms. I suggested to insert a three foot pipe to handle the issue.
l) I took the time to test my favorite external sounds. Both sounds were exceptionally well received by those birds species found around his BH. There were more than 60 birds responded at noon time.
m) All amplifiers were not properly set. A very common error in nearly all BHs that I have visited. Reset the settings and more birds seems to respond even with the same sound played.
n) The current hexagonal tweeter was a bit too high, wrongly position and too big. I proposed to relocate its position.
o) After the revamp operation, my idea of carrying out forced harvest suits well with the owner. I believed he will get a 30-40% increase in nests number after two months.
Something great to look forward and hope the starting date will be in July 2013.
Any of you who wanted to join the fun please call 017 7551318
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