Bird attacked camera.

This bird in my BH must have seen the IR red light in my CCTV camera.
He came directly to attack the camera.

Second shit spot

When I was young, I used to hear the grown up said " shit is luck". I always wondered what's the meaning of that.
What's a nonsense! I didn't bother to ask why, because I don't believe in it.

Now I know why shit is luck.
Because I am so happy to see shit!
I have now the second small shit spot.



The first spot, just a little bit denser.


So I am now a "shit watcher", hopefully can slowly become a "bird watcher" and later a "nest counter".

Position of fake nest.

From the above pictures, we can see that birds built nests on the upper part of the wood plank first.
I guess this is for both safety reason and hygienic reason. I guess the parents must think that the higher the safer and also don't want others to shit on their head or their nest.
Only when the space on the above role is full or scarce to find, then they will build their nests on the second row slightly lower if your plank are wide enough to accommodate.
Those of you who want to install only 6 inch width wood plank should think twice. Six inch might not be wide enough for the second row nests.

In the above house, at first, we installed the fake nests at the lower part of the plank (8 inch) near the speakers, as seen in most of the pictures from the internet. Results were not to our satisfaction as we aimed high.
Birds were not interested, they would rather built their nests themselves on the upper part as in the above picture.

When we saw that, we moved all the fake nests up to the upper part, after only around 1.5 months, most of the fake nests were occupied!
We used only food grade Silicone fake nests.







Thanks for the pictures from Khun Wor's blog at http://www.swiftletsourceofinformation.blogspot.com/

This technique is good only if you want to increase the birds population soonest and don't care much about the quality of the nests at this moment.

Believe it or not, it's your decision, I just recorded and shared to you what I found FOC.

Testing New Sound

During one year of my blog writing, I met all walks of life.
Some of my readers (type A), I don't want to describe them. I only know that I don't want to associate with.
But some of my readers (type B), quite a few, are very kind, very polite, very nice and very generous persons.
So even the ratio of type A: type B is 100: 1, I still think that this blog writing and sharing is worth my effort.

Recently one of my nice reader, Mr.E, who wanted to remain anonymous, recommended me a good sound and couldn't resist me asking for his sound (he also didn't want me to expose the sound name) sent me the sound. He wanted me to test the sound and see for myself how good this sound is and then let him know the result. This sound is not for sale!

I live 600 km away from my BH. How to test a sound from 600 km away during this monsoon season which very few birds playing with sounds at any BH? I have to find a way to test this sound. So I told my friend that I wanted to test a sound inside his BH with his current tenants, lucky me to have a nice friend, he agreed to one sound. Thus, he played this new sound for me on his two speakers at the entrance hole of his nesting room.

Here are the results:
Jan 8th, Jan 9th two days before the experiment, speakers still played his old sound.
The data from our recorder showed very few records in the morning around 6.30 am.
Birds woke up and left the house as usual.





In the late evening of Jan 9th, he changed his current sound to this new sound.

Next morning on Jan 10th, at 6.30 am, the no. of records jumped to more than 100 records which were too many records for the recorder to show in one page, and also at around 6.30 am., the datum were of much higher KB from the previous days, increasing from 3552, 1874 KB to 10387 KB. Which mean the CCTV detected more motions on this day than the previous two days.





Jan10th, birds woke up in the morning didn't leave the house as usual, they couldn't resist flying around, checking and playing with this new sound.



I am not sure how long will it last, until today (6 days already) they still enjoyed this new sound.

I happily and quickly reported the result and sent the video to Mr.E, asked his permission to share the findings with my readers here.
He agreed but didn't want me to publish his name nor his sound name.
Thanks to Mr. E and my friend the owner of this BH. May God bless you both in every way you wish.

If you are interested in my experiment and finding and want to do this same experiment or further experiments yourself with your own sound, be my guest.

Anyone who do not believe in what I did, please ignore it, don't bother wasting your time to nag me.

I am not selling the sound or selling anything here, so I don't need to prove anything to anyone.
I just want to record and share what I found with my nice readers.

Just came back

Just came back from checking my bird house. This is my first visit since operating.
Before I went down there, I was reported that there were very few birds surveying in the whole area during past weeks.

On Tuesday Jan 11th afternoon that I arrived, I saw few birds circling above my house.
Checked the CCTV tape on the past weeks, indeed there were very few records.



Went inside the house to check bird shit. Found only one small spot.



Checked the temperature and humidity of second floor from the controller. Not too bad.
Controllers for other floors are not installed yet.
This one is from Korea with very good quality sensor with 30 meters wire.



On the next day saw 10-40 birds circling above the house from 7-9 am, 1 pm and 4.30- 5.30 pm.
But it looked like birds preferred to fly above the entrance hole all day, very few get inside!
Also found that the internal sound tweeters were too loud.
So it seemed like there are certain things that are not right, that deterred birds from going inside the house.
Need to do more home works!



For peace of mind, I told myself since this is a stand alone BH, I can't expect the result to be as good as those in the center.
In fact all the internal tweeters were just installed last week. Two weeks before that, only the external sounds were played.

An Old Ladder

Today my gardener took out a ladder to cut the old leaves of palm trees in my house.
When I saw the ladder, I said to myself, oh I already have a good ladder that I bought long long time ago.
You can see how rusty the steel rods are at the base from the photos below.
How can I be so forgetful, must be my age!

It's a knock down type and each part can be bought separately, should be very applicable for bird house.

New Year Gift

My son gave me this box of gift.



He said while you are awaiting anxiously for your own bird nest, please relax and enjoy this one first.





No matter how busy you are with your work, don't forget to invest your time and effort in your own children.
If you do it right, pay back, in terms of happiness, is much better than any kind of investment in the world.

One month after.

From a friend's bird house, who is also my partner on my bird house.
Picture from last post on Dec4th, 2010. Only 6 months old BH.



One month after.

New update.

Final look of the building, all the scaffolding removed.



It's easier for me to get into the BH now. Before I needed to have some assistant to get into the building.


The Ben, not fully operated yet.


Safety first! A strong ladder to the roof top, still messy around here.


Some small decoration to the building.

Happy new year to all my blog readers,

Happy new year to all my secret admirers,

Happy new year to all my commentators,

Happy new year to all my supporters.