Birdhouse Tweeters Can Be Your Powerfull Weapons In Populating Your New BH

How many of us really knows the importance of tweeters?

All this while we were only told only about their basic function. That is to play either those internal or external sounds.

Are there any other functions that can help to bring more birds into our BHs?

Is their size and shape very important?

How about the way we mount them onto those nesting planks? Are there any guidelines to maximise their usefulness?

What about the optimum numbers that we should install? How many is good and why?

The installation techniques, do we need to orientate them in vertical or horizontal?

How far should they be mounted away from those nesting planks corners? How many inches away and why?

When we wired them which cable goes to which wire?

How many tweeters per wire?

Is it good to install those tweeters based on zones?

There are many more questions that we can raise and our only trouble is who can give us the right answers.

Nowadays we no longer want straight answers but we want a full explanations on why the answers should be like that or like this.


Many of us only know that the basic function in deploying those tweeters inside their BH is only to provide those baby sound to lure those wild birds to stay and build their nests.

I think we are not 100% correct. I believed that every tweeter that we placed in our BH have multiple functions which we tend to ignore or perhaps no "fucking ideas" of any other function except to deliver those sound signal from our amplifiers.

Just step aside and evaluate these points:

1) When you just operate a new BH and opened for operation for the first few months, where will those bird shit spots were found? The answer is below those tweeters.

2) When you discovered that your BH have her first nest markings, where was it located? Normal answer will be the 90* nesting plank corner closed to the tweeter.

3) If you install 20 tweeters in your new BH and when you count the bird shit spots on the floor, how many will be they be? The answer will probably 20. Hey how come the number is nearly the same as the number of tweeters?

4) If you install a tweeter on your cement walls playing those Baby King sound, where will the nest be build? The answer is on the cement wall either above or at the left side or the right side of the tweeter. Hmm..... very interesting.

5) If you happened to visit your new BH at night (10pm onward) and do a bird count check, where do your think those birds that entered your BH will be found? On the tweeter. In fact the loving couple will share one tweeter most of the time. Hmm... why they prefer to hang to those tweeters?

The more you look at those black gadget the more you begin to realise that there are more then delivering of those sound.

Beside playing those birds music they have many more functions and we need to fully study and understand all these functions.

Once you have determined all their functions, you can then design with precision on how to choose them and how to install them. Remember the word "PRECISION".

Remember they have more then one function.

a) Their basic function is to play those soothing bird sound. If those young birds love the sound they will stay in your BH.

b) The birds do not have any idea that there is such thing as tweeters. To them the only way to give those sound, it must be from a nest. Those babies must be hungry and calling for food. So to feel very safe is to stay close to those sound.

c) The tweeter with those music played tend to be warmer then the surrounding. Those birds will find those warm surface a good place to stay.

d) If you check your BH and all the tweeters were occupied, (count the bird shit spots and compare with the number of tweeters you installed), you need to increase them to a comfortable number. The rule of the thumb is 1 tweeter per square meter. If you are smart push it to 1.25 or 1.5 per square meter.

e) The best choice will be those rectangular shape tweeters (2" x 5") and not those square shape tweeters. Main reason being, the square shape will not allow you to install the tweeter properly onto the nesting planks due to their design.

f) My preferred installation technique is to let the tweeter stand. Yes the 2" section screwed onto the nesting plank while the 5" section will be standing up. The 2" section will limit the number of birds to stay to only two (one set). This will cause less headache to the male bird. Remember three is a crowd.

g) The placement of these 2"x5" tweeter should be about 3-5 inches away from the 90* nesting planks corners. The reason of this selection is that the young couple will soon build their nest at this corner. While the male is busy building he can also can keep a close eye on his female partner. If he is not careful another male might come and steal her away.

h) The tweeter should never be installed until it touches the ceiling. This will reduce the tweeters function. They should be installed on the perimeter of the nesting plank, at the bottom tongue about one inch up.

i) Start the tweeter installation from the end of the nesting room. If you cannot use the 1st plank on the cement wall, due to the tweeter's base, skip to the second row of those nesting planks. Start from one end of the wall and move towards the other wall. Once you complete jump one line and move to the nesting plank row number four.

j) It is worth to install two tweeters at the start and the end of every row chosen. The twin tweeter concept have proven to be very attractive to those wild birds in many BHs that I visited.

k) Once you reached the first nesting planks crossing you should install one each on the left and right side of it. Yes you will need to install the tweeter about 3-5 inches to the left and right of the 90* corners.

l) Move to the next crossing and do exactly the same as in k) and repeat the installation on the rest of the crossings.

m) It is important to connect the positive wires from the tweeter to the positive wire of the signal wire to the data room. Any error of joining the positive and negative to the signal wire will cause serious sound defect to you BH sound system. If might also lead to constant electrical trips.

n) I recommend the terminal connecting the tweeter to the data room to be at the 1st row of the tweeter on the planks. If you do this the sound at the furthers line will be louder then the one in the middle or the other end.

Another Genius Using A Tee Pipe As His Hexagonal Tweeters

If you happened to have a BH closed to a populated areas at one side while at the opposite there are only jungles or no residential areas you might want to think about this special hexagonal tweeters.

I was in Sungai Patani recently doing some renovation works for another Blog reader.

During my inspection of his BH from the outside I was attracted to his neighbor roof top.

I saw a Tee pipe, white in color protruded on the monkey house area.

At first I though it was nothing more then a gimmick to lure those wild birds.

I walked nearer and I begin to realized that this BH owner is genious.  He block the sound from going to the back but focus the sound onto my client's BH.

Hmm this is going to be a big war.

It seem that he insert three round tweeters inside the Tee to allow the sound to be diverted only to three directions and not the back.

He also use the T to prevent his tweeters from those rain water.

A marvelous idea which I would like to share with my blog readers.

The Best Way To Cool Your BH

This was the exact word from a BH owner whose BH was recently renovated with proper roof and side walls protection.

He should have done that during the construction stage but that time he was trying to cut corners.

The relevant lesson here is that when you design a BH you need to make sure the internal room temperature will not crossed the 30*C level.

Make sure the top floor of your BH are protected from direct sunlight and those walls facing the sun are double walls.

To those who have not taken the necessary precautions you best bet is to regularly check your BH and in the event your temperature hit 30*C and above you need to determine where those heat are coming from.  Use those laser temperature gun to find them.

A few months ago I was helping a BH owner to revamp his BH.  I saw this simple gadget to cool those water used by the chicken coop humidifiers.

The unit was made of a big tub complete with the water inlet and outlet plus a pump to suck the water up to a pipe which spray the water back into the tub.  A fan was used to cool the water when it fall down.

The water temperature was about 25*C.

If you push this water to your humidifiers in your BH, can you imagine what will happened to your room temperature?

Yesterday I check the BH temperature and the result was about 27*C.  Prior to the installation it was about 30.5*C.

Simple but effective for those BH that face slight temperature variations.

Try Not To Use The Monkey House To Store Those Water Tank

The sole purpose of your monkey house in your BH is to attract those wild birds entering the house and no other purposes.

During one of my inspection visit, I was shown how a monkey house was used to store those water tank.

To store the water tank the owner put up a floor about 2/3 the size of the monkey house floor.  Only 1/3 was opened for those birds with lots of sharp corners to reach the entrance door into the nesting room. There were two partitions, floor up that simply block the flying path.

I think this should not be encouraged.

A monkey house with a floor and opened only 1/3 plus lots of walls and staircase area will defeat its actual purpose.

I would like to remind all my blog readers that it is not easy to lure these wild birds into your BH even with a proper opening, wide and total, of the monkey house floor.  If you should start blocking their flying path, I can say that you are not helping your self.

Try to locate the water tank to other part of the BH.  The best is at a corner on the top most floor of your BH nesting room.  You can erect a platform to provide the height for the water pressure.

Open the monkey house floor to the maximum and allow those precious birds to fly with ease to your nesting room.

Trust me that by blocking their flying path inside the monkey house you will face a huge problem in populating your BH.

No matter how many thousands of birds are out there, they will ignore your BH if you do not understand their needs and proper flying path into your house.

They might enter your BH just one time and once they discovered that the flying path is too tight, where they might hurt themselves, they will not enter your BH any more.

Treat this article as something that you can learn and make sure you do not make the same mistake.

Usefullness In Using Alluminium Plate As Nesting Platform

I was reading an article about the nesting platform in BHs.

The most common and reasonably  cheap in Malaysia will be those made of wood either Red Meranti or Jati. 

These planks must be free of any smell that are prohibitive to encourage those swiftlet from making their nests.

When wet they must not be easily grow fungus on them.

Over a prolong period of time they must not be easily rot and become soft due to high humidity inside the nesting room.

They must be also hard enough so that during harvesting they are easily chipped off causing these wood pieces to be embedded inside the nests this causing a drop in nest pricing.

One major problems with wood is that they tend to affect the nests color when they start to rot.

What if these platform be substituted with say aluminum plate?

To avoid the wood causing problems on your nests, about 1 mm thick and 5 inches wide.

First we need to cut some grooves on it and later sandwiched on the wood nesting planks.

The use of aluminium plates seems to be quite common in many parts of Indonesia.

Their main advantages are:

1) It can have a much longer life span as compared to normal wood.
2) It will not grow fungus even when it is partially or totally wet.
3) It has no smell to distract those young birds.
3)The surface is cooler as compared to wood and will condense those mist on it which is well like by swiftlet.
4) It will not turn the nests into other color except white.
5) You can make it wider in size this will increase the number of nests per foot run.
6) It can be used to cover those wood surface that are badly attack by fungus.
7) It is light weight and easy to install or remove.
8) The cost per foot run is cheaper then stainless steel.
9) You can actually move the plate once they have been used to a new BH.  This will help to quickly populate your new BH.
10)You can adjust the groove size or distance apart if you wanted to.
11) You can put different color on the plate to attract those swiftlet.  Fatick Marzuki recommend to paint these aluminium plate to either black or blue.  I recommend black, blue, green, pink and colorless.
12) You can also use these plates to test your aroma.  Take three to four plates and spray them with your newly found aroma.  Dry them up and install the plates onto your nesting planks.
13) Once the birds prefer to colonies onto these plates you will have more nest with 180* shape.  They might abandon the idea of building their nest at those 90* and 130* corners.


The only disadvantage, I am not very sure, is the effect of aluminium oxide that tends to build up on the surface of the plates when exposed to air. Normally any metal that are exposed to air will form a kind of oxide layer or skin to prevent any corrosion to the main metal.

So far there is not report of aluminium oxide poisoning.

I recently met a sale person handling aluminium materials.

I wanted to carry out some research on their effectiveness.  I have ordered about 60 pieces of plates 1mmX 125 mm X 2 feet with 5 grooves.

The Use Of Medium Size Piezo As Internal Sound Tweeters

This was something rare but I saw it being used by one BH owner and it works.

The owner uses medium size piezo tweeters as his internal sound tweeters.

As far as I know normally we recommend the use of small size tweeters either the 4"X4" square of the 2"X5" size. However this BH owner uses the 3"by 7" tweeters.

I was very taken back with his approach but then it works.

He placed the tweeter on the wall far away from the nesting planks (about 1.5 foot below). What happened was those birds build their nest on the cement wall about a few inches away. They seem to like the sound so much and prefer to be closed to the tweeter.

I was taken back and feel very surprised. Well as I always says that the more you know them the more you need to know about their mysterious behaviours.

I am sure I will make this as an option or goodies for any new BH. What the hack, if they like it then we just try.

My recommendation is to install a few at some strategic locations, not more then 4-6 of these medium size tweeters per floor (20'X70'). Play internal sound on them.

You have nothing to loose as long as your internal sound is perfect.

How To Attract Old Birds Into Your BH

What is so significant about the word "homing behaviour" in swiftlet farming dictionary (I hope there is one)?

This special word is to describe a very interesting behaviour of those matured birds that have already selected a place to build their nests to bring up their family.

The particular BH or cave selected will normally be their only home where they will live forever until they die or when the BH or cave is no longer suitable.

Which mean to say that old or matured birds will have very little tendencies in shifting their nest from the origanal BH to a new BH. This is embeded into their brain.

But is there any chance to lure them over to your new BH and how to do it?

If you wanted to take the challenge, you might want to do the followings:

1) Move those planks and fake nests from your old BH to your new BH.

This might be possible if you look at it logically.

Assuming you have a full house and you wanted some of these old matured birds to help in populating a new BH you build just a few meters away.

What you can do is to move some of those nesting planks across. Dismantle those planks with lots of markings or those full cup nests from your old BH across to your new unit.

Even if your new BH is much further then 5 meters, say 1 kilometer away, but you know pretty well that those birds always pass above the new BH land, you can do the same technique.

Beside those planks with markings and nests, you might want to also consider moving those fake nests (already used at least twice), corner covers (will lots of nest markings on them) and perhaps those tweeters (with marking or nest on them).

2) You need to play Baby Sound to attract them.

This is something that you have never thought before. Most of time you tend to attract those young birds into your BH. You totally neglect the possibilities in pulling those matured birds over.

It is well said that if your BH is located below a flight path, the best way to bring those young birds down will be the mating bird call sound.

However if your BH is located in a "Walet Sentral" area (located within a short distance to a very successful BH) you stand a very strong chance to pull those matured birds using those baby sound.

Baby sound refer to those sound made by baby birds asking to be fed by their parent.

Remember the chances to pull them over will not be as easy as those young birds. All in all they seem to have a very strong attachment with their nests especially those will a set of eggs to be incubated or babies to be fed.

The only time they have a laps of memory is immediately after they babies have just taken their maiden flight.