(Look how bright are all these roving areas )
Does it matter where the entrance hole is facing? Yes and No…and depends. It is more important that the entrance hole facing the direction (area) of birds searching for food than the direction of birds coming back.
Many years back perhaps 20 years ago many would avoid placing the EH (Entrance Hole) facing East or West. This is caused by the fear of the Sunlight shines directly into the farm.
I don’t see this as problem as our mind and intelligent are flexible, we could solve all these sunlight things by using partition and design an internal system that could accommodate this problem.
Those who know how to do it and understand the usage of partitioning consider the Sunlight problem doesn’t exist at all.
Sometimes we couldn’t avoid placing EH at certain directions. This happens to those ready built shop Lot units where the owner has no control over the position of the frontage of the shop. Or sometimes for a Standalone where the landscaping doesn’t allowed us to place the EH as we desire.( wind, hills,etc)
From here it doesn’t mean we could no longer build a good farm. We could always counter this by coming up with a good design that adapted to the building position or the external environment.
I personally wouldn’t bias towards North or South or West or East for EH position. All I look for is where the birds are. As for reducing the early morning or the evening sun I would use the internal design and the size of the EH to counter the bright beam.
Don’t forget for newly built swiftlet farm light intensity is very important. We need certain amount of bright light in newly built farm to attract large amount of birds to fly in to play. The more Birds that fly into the farm to play the higher the chances they stay. If it is too dark young birds wouldn’t venture deep inside the farm because they have yet to get use to the new environment and often frighten.
This often confused many Swiftlets farmers. Those who had visited successful Swiftlet farm would argue that most of the successful swiftlet farms are very dark. One could hardly find the way out if without a flashlight. In certain ways they are right. Therefore the darker the farm the better it is and they hold to this principle and later to discover that their farms failed without any nests after many months.
Have you ever heard about this phrase in books “Have a big EH for new farm and Later as the population increased then Reduce the size of the EH” Do you understand what it means? They didn’t elaborate didn’t they? The books thought that all swiftlet farmers are smart perhaps otherwise.
Why as population increased then the light intensity could be reduced? New Farms should have big EH so that the farm is brighter, easy for young birds to maneuver, not easily frighten, etc. When Population increased that means it could be 1 or 2 years later by this time the residents would have got used to the darkness and the flying path. So even with a small EH that has reduced the light intensity birds won’t find any difficulty to fly in and out as they had got used to it.
Obviously they could also use echolocation but this only applied to mature birds. Mature birds are not as easy to attract as young birds. If a newly built farm is too dark then it is inviting trouble.
The future of a newly built swiftlet farm relied very much on young birds not old and mature birds. Therefore when you build a Swiftlet farms make sure it has all the good qualities in it that could attract large number of young birds.
As for the position of the EH, well it could be any place or direction you want provided you understand and know between the light intensity for young birds and Mature birds. I am sure you all have seen many very successful farms EH facing West as well as East and also many failed farms EH facing same.
Good Swiftlet Farming ALL. The Best is To Share!
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