Birds are not coming in, or they come and do not stay. The first thought for most farmers is: maybe my sound is not good enough. Should I change it?
Sound is the easiest thing in the house to change, so when people panic, that is where the hand goes first. I went down that road myself.
But whether a sound is good can only be judged inside your own house. A track that works in someone else’s house may not work in yours. And a track that looks busy in the first few days is not proof that it is right.
What you are seeing
You put on a new external sound. For the first few days it is busy outside. Suddenly there are more birds, flying around. You feel good. This one must be right.
A while later, it is back to how it was. No new nests. No more birds inside.
So you start thinking: maybe this track is still not good enough. Let me try another one.
Three common mistakes
One: a busy first week means it is a good sound.
When a new sound goes on, birds get curious and fly over to check what it is. That busy period is real. But once the curiosity wears off, the birds drift back. Whatever is holding your house back is still sitting in the same place. A track cannot reach it.
So if birds come for a few days and then leave, do not blame the sound first. Most of the time the problem is somewhere else in the house.
Two: the house next door has lots of birds, so I will use their track.
Think about it. Five identical shops open on the same street. Why would a customer walk into yours? Sound works the same way. The more your sound is like your neighbour’s, the less reason a bird has to pick you.
Birds do compare. If two houses play roughly the same sound, they go to the one with better conditions. Your neighbour only needs to be a little better than you, and you lose.
Also, how many years that house has been running, how it is partitioned inside, how many birds live there: none of it matches yours. A track that suits his house may be exactly wrong for yours.
Three: a sound from the internet or from a friend can go straight in.
You can try it. Just do not expect too much.
A lot of the sound files going around have passed through many hands. What you get may not be the original track anymore.
There is one more thing few people think about. A sound is made to match a certain kind of amplifier. Change the machine, and the same settings do not give you the same result. When a sound works well in someone else’s house, it is working with his amplifier, his house and his bird count. None of those are yours.
How to judge it
Think about external sound and internal sound separately. They do different jobs.
External sound works outside the door. It calls passing swiftlets down to look at your house. Internal sound works inside. It makes the birds that come in want to stay. However good the external sound is, if the inside cannot hold them, birds take a look and leave.
So when you judge an external sound, you can only judge the first part of the job: are birds being called down? Whether they get in after that depends on the entrance hole, whether the sound is tuned right, and whether the flight path is smooth. Changing a track does not fix those.
So after a sound change, what do you watch?
Do not count the first week. Wait one or two weeks, pick a rainy, cloudy day, and see if new birds still come.
There is also a layer that has to do with tweeters. Kiew Meng Kui, who teaches the Swiftlet Signature Masterclass (SSM) with me, has talked about how real the sound feels. With too many tweeters, the same sound plays from many tweeters at the same moment, and the sound loses that realness. That is one layer of the too-many-tweeters problem. The other is that sound works like road signs: too many and the swiftlets cannot find their own home. I wrote about that in Where should tweeters go in a swiftlet house?
When it is time to change the sound
When an external sound has played for a long time, birds get bored of it. Changing it then is right.
But when you change matters more than how often. Before you do it, ask yourself: is there room for new birds in my house right now? Is the way in smooth?
If you change before the inside is ready, new birds get called in, find no place to live or struggle to get in, take one round and leave. You end up sending a group of birds away yourself, and they remember your house.
Kiew Meng Kui puts it more bluntly: sound only pulls. If there is no place inside for new birds to nest, you cannot keep what you pull in, and the more you pull, the worse it gets.
So the order matters. Fix the problems inside the house first, then change the sound. How good the inside needs to be before you touch the sound, and how to plan the day you do it, we cover step by step in the Swiftlet Signature Masterclass (SSM).
How loud the sound should be is a separate question. See Is louder swiftlet sound better?
Next step
Do not rush to try another track.
Tell us about your sound first: how long you have used the external sound, how many times you have changed it, and where you got it. Then film your way in from the entrance hole on your phone, talking as you go, and record the internal sound and then the external sound.
Send the photos, the recording and your notes to our WhatsApp. We will go through your house with the MDK Swiftlet House Diagnosis Method and find where it is stuck. Diagnosis first, prescription second.
We also give out free external sound at the moment, just ask. But if the house is stuck at the entrance hole or the flight path, a new sound can only do so much. So send the video along with your request.