Hi guys, just found this topic I never thought that there's such a thread on lowyat

I've been in the swiftlet business for 3-4 years now.

Personally, I think aroma for BH is just part of the equation. It is just like staying healthy, if you want to stay healthy, you have to put effort in maintaining your 1.diet 2.exercising 3.spiritual/mental well being etc. But in the real world you have people selling supplements claiming that taking a single pill everyday would instantly make you healthy!

Same applies to a BH, if you want a successful BH there are so many factors that include 1. sound 2. temp 3. flight path 4.Geographical location etc. A bottle of hormone claiming to be the solution to all your BH problems just doesn't make a lot of sense IMHO.

But why would you want your BH to breathe when the standard practice is to have ventilation holes all over the BH?

Isn't that breathing in a sense, and you can control your humidity by sealing off/opening up ventilation holes.

sosos, I would say 2years 80 nest isn't very successful.

Don't fret, because at least there are 80 nests in your BH, which means you did something right.

I'm not as experienced as WestWing and tuckfook but from my experience, 2 years with 80 nest means you're probably having very slow nest growth rate. However, given the number of BHs near your area means this area definitely has a ton of swifts flying around.

First things to look at is your BH design, whether the route to fly into the BH is correct. Then you have to look internally which includes your speakers, temperature, humidity, internal design etc.

Hope that helps!



This post has been edited by northface: Jun 13 2011, 10:13 PM

No, probably means that the government knows that the swiftlet farming industry can fetch big bucks and they want a piece of the action.

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Added on June 13, 2011, 11:35 pmGuys I made a blog to share some pics of my BH, please visit and comment thanks!

http://nestfarm.blogspot.com/



This post has been edited by northface: Jun 13 2011, 11:35 PM

I think what mois meant was if on average the BH around your area has 500 nests within 2 years, and you only have 50 after 2 then that means you are underperforming the rest by a big chunk.

As for competition, when there are that MANY BH around your area it will definitely affect results.

I added a video that I took last month, close to 200 dropping spots.

Sifu WW, I think it is pretty common for ppl in Kuantan to practice force harvesting as I've heard from a few of BH owners in the area and when I question them on the ethics of doing so, they would shoot back saying things like "It is the dry season so the chicks will most likely die of malnutrition anyways, so might as well make it simpler for them".

However, I do not believe that slow growth is attributed to force harvesting only. To my knowledge, there are 200+ BH in Kuantan city itself, that's excluding nearby Gambang and the agricultural lands nearby etc.

The sheer amount of BH in an area can definitely dilute the growth of BH. We all know that swiftlets feed in the wild, they are not like chickens and ducks locked in coups. Therefore, the food chain nearby has to be able to sustain a X amount of swifts.

Even though the number of swifts might have been 10 times compared to 10 years ago, but when divided over so many BHs of course growth will slow down.

I often see people flock to a 'successful' area with lots of birds and personally I would advise against doing so. I would rather go to a new area with not many birds and start my own BH as long as the ecosystem around that area can sustain life for swiftlets, just my 2 cents

I think the external sound like more important, at least in the beginning.

There was this new BH I had, after starting operation for about 2 weeks there was already 30-40 spots of bird droppings.
But after inspecting the BH, I forgot to turn on the external sound but left internal sound intact.

After 1.5 months when I went to inspect that BH there were 0 new bird droppings, and the existing ones seem to have stopped coming back even. This is because the pile of dropping did not increase in size.

But one thing for sure is the birds love to make their nest near the tweeters. When you have a new BH you will almost always find droppings right underneath where your tweeters are located.

Ever since I got into this industry, for me it was pretty common sense that you take good care of the eggs and chicks because one day they will be back making nests and hence they are basically your 'tenants'.

It is hard to fathom killing your 'tenants' just because you want cleaner nests. Those that do so are plain stupid and short-sighted.

Those that practice force-harvest are lucky because they are some of the earlier ones that started operating BHs therefore the birds (if any are left) would keep going back to their place.

I think when more BHs spring up, they would slowly move into the ones that are better managed, and the reckless farmers will end up the biggest losers, don't worry time will tell!

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Added on June 15, 2011, 4:43 pmAn observation lately, my new BH in Pekan has 100 or so spots in 3 months but there are already 30+ nests in construction.

Normally this isn't the case, as young birds will take a couple months before the reach sexual maturity and breed. Can it be that some of the 'old birds' are fleeing the BHs of reckless farmers and settling at mine?



This post has been edited by northface: Jun 15 2011, 04:43 PM

Rm8 per sq.ft? That's crazy, a standard BH of 24x70 3 storeys would be 5,040 sq.ft.

That would be over RM 40,000 per year for license, how did the Melaka council come up with such a number?

When you 'rip' from a CD to form MP3, there will be loss in quality because it encodes the data so the file will be much smaller.
A straight rip from CD track would be 100-200 megabytes for a mp3 of the same length. (3-4 minutes)

If you look at a mp3 file playing there's usually a bitrate showing, normally 128kbps or 256kbps (kilo bits per second). And if you look at swiftlet sounds they are normally encoded at 128 kbps or even 96 kbps. The quality is just mediocre at best, of course if you can encode mp3 at up to 512 kbps but if the CD you rip it from is staticky it wouldn't matter what bit rate it is.

I think the best would be going into a BH with a couple thousands of nests and use your own high quality Digital Voice Recorder, record different sounds and mesh them together using an audio software according to your own liking.



This post has been edited by northface: Jun 19 2011, 10:34 AM

10k to 270k is already starting to sound like a Ponzi scheme.

Sure everything looks fine and attractive, 3-5 years down the road they go belly up and investors are left with nothing, best part is they are a RM2 company and you can't do shit abt it.

But for every savvy investor, there will be 10 suckers born.

Ok I'm wrong about the paid up capital, but that isn't even the major issue.
They are advertising like 10k to 270k in 35 years is guaranteed. Go to their website and the first popup notice, what is it? U guessed it, 10k to 270k!!!


There will be no return during the initial investment period when the Scheme commences with the purchasing of farms and ranching activities start to pick up, waiting for the next generation of swiftlets to settle in the farms. Nevertheless, the Scheme has sufficient capital to provide for returns during the initial years in the form of vouchers. Investors will be given RM800 worth of vouchers to redeem quality bird’s nest products in the first 6 years of investment. These vouchers form part of the Guaranteed Return of the Scheme policy. Based on a RM10,000# investment, an RM800 voucher represents 8% return per annum, much higher than the fixed deposit rates of 3% to 4% offered by banks or some unit trust companies.

From year 4 to year 35, a yearly return will be derived from the bird’s nest harvest. It is projected that for every one unit of investment, the return will be RM270,000. This projection has been verified by established independent swiftlet ranching consultants and the figures given are considered to be conservative estimates.


There are just so many unknowns in this statement. Lol what the hell is an "established independent swiftlet ranching consultant".

Dude those are not facts, just over-hyped self prophesized statements, I've been in this industry long enough to know you can't forecast how many nests you gonna get, and that my friend is a fact.

So far I've not seen a single large-scale bird house development that has been a success. Because it is common sense, swiftlets are not like a car factory where cars are pumped out 24 hrs non stop, the swiftlets take time to grow and when you have a large cluster of BH all operating on one go, growth will be VERY slow.

That's my final say on this. I guess since you posted that link you have some vested interest on it. If you're an investor I wish you luck.

This post has been edited by northface: Jun 21 2011, 10:52 AM

There's a question I need the input from sifus here.
Is it possible to have 2 entrance in a BH?

Basically this is the deal, my friend's BH 24x80 3 storeys initially started with roof opening, however after 4-5 months only 2-3 spots of droppings on the 2nd floor.

After paying his place a visit I recommended him to try hacking off a side entrance on another side (for example roof ent on south side, side ent on north side). This worked as after 1 month now there is already 10 new spots of dropping in 2nd floor. Then we sealed off the roof entrance.

But the birds aren't going down to 1st and ground floor at all.

The reason might be because the stairs were designed to be near the roof opening so then can fly down.
But since the new entrance is on another side of the building, the stairs are very far away, the birds need to fly almost to the other end before they can go down.

I was thinking to reopen the roof opening, maybe partially not fully so there will be some light and the birds can see the path down to 1st and ground floor, will this work?

This post has been edited by northface: Jun 24 2011, 06:46 PM

Added picture, the red dots are where the new droppings are located at, notice they only spread around 2nd floor but do not go down to 1st floor, let alone ground floor.

So I was thinking of re-opening the old entrance, would that work?


Attached thumbnail(s)

Sifu ayah embong,

Since the new entrance is side, in order to preserve some nesting space therefore a partition is made, if not it is too bright. As of now seems like some birds are settling down there so it should be fine. The end of the partition should have extended all the way to where the old roof entrance was. But since this renovation was done in the short time we decided to just leave that one wall, so it might look weird to yo.

The stair void is large enough, it's 10x12ft.
Looking at my picture, I just don't know how to guide the birds down to the 1st and ground floor. There's ZERO droppings, not even a tiny droplet near the void.

The birds just come in the side entrance and turn into the partitioned room.

Yes the original entrance is better, but after 5 months like I said, only 2-3 spots on top floor, rest of the lower floors nothing.
So I scouted around the area and noticed most BHs there were facing the direction where the NEW side entrance is now.

I'm not too worried abt the partition since there are already swiftlets roosting there now.
Like I said, I'd don't know how to 'pull' the birds down to the lower floor. The 2nd floor is already a mess because the where the original roof opening is wasted a lot of space.

I'll try what Ayah embong suggested to put more pulling tweeters see whether they go down.
Here's how the BH looks like before a side ent was modified.


The way the side ENT is located now, very little sunlight reaches the 1st floor, even less on the ground floor. For my humanly eyes, it is almost impossible to see on those floors. It is to my understanding that swiftlets do not like it completely 100% pitch black as well, isn't it?

So sifus please advise, since they're already coming into the top floor, how do I get them down the other floors?

This post has been edited by northface: Jun 24 2011, 11:32 PM


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Thanks sifu aeiou for the reply. Atm no choice because as you can see the new ent is too far away from the stairs.

Eventually if they still don't go down have to probably have to hack an opening in the slab closer to entrace but that would be a pain in the ass, lots of dirt/ashes in the BH =nightmare cleaning up.

Btw since I'm new, sometimes I'm lost on certain terms that you guys use, we should start a glossary of terms that we use.

Let me start,

BH- Bird house
EBN- Edible bird's nest
AF- ?
LMB- ?

All sifus please add