Harvesting

I have not written this blog for a long time because there is nothing much to write about. Just waiting, waiting and waiting only. But now it is time for me to harvest some nests. So I visited my bird house on 6 May with my friend Mr. Chong. He is there to teach me how to harvest my first bird nest.

There are already more than 30 numbers of bird nests in the bird house. The number is not great but I am quite satisfied because the area where my bird house located don’t have many swiftlets. I noticed that 8 out of the 10 fake bird nests that I have installed were occupied by the swiftlets. Some of them have eggs inside and some have baby swiftlets hanging on the nests. I plan to removed the fake nests and install it at other locations when the baby swiftlets become adult.

Anyway, Mr. Chong taught me how to harvest the bird nests. First, he climbed up the ladder and used a mirror to look into the nest. If there is no egg inside the nest, he then used his finger to touch inside the nest just to be doubly sure. After that a scrapper is used to harvest the nest. I have bought a scrapper which is about 4” wide thinking that the scrapper must be as wide as the nest :) However, my friend said that it is not suitable and gave me a scraper which is about 1.5” wide. Yes, I think smaller scrapper has more flexibility especially for nests that are at the corner.

Most of the nests inside the bird house have either eggs or bird inside the nest. I only manage to harvest 5 nests. My friend Chong said that my bird house is about 2 weeks slower than his bird houses.

After harvesting, Mr. Chong said that the nests are quite dry and asked me to increase the room humidity by changing the humidifier with a larger propeller. He also suggested that I start to harvest the nests every month and I should see the nests increase very fast.

I weighted the nests when I went home. It was about 42g for the 5 nests. I was told that there should be about 110 nests per KG, so with a quick calculation, 5 nest should weight about 45g. Looks like my nests are under weight. Maybe the nest is too dry or the swiftlets are too small.