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.