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.