You check the CCTV at night and there they are, a row of swiftlets asleep on the planks. Then you count the nests. Months later, still the same few.
The birds are there. They come back every night. They just will not settle in your house.
What you are looking at
Birds fly in at dusk and leave in the morning. The droppings on the floor grow every day, and on CCTV you can see birds moving around. But the nests on the planks do not go up.
A lot of owners get more anxious at this point, not less. The birds are already inside, so why won’t they build? What is missing?
First, make sure they really sleep there
Separate two cases before anything else.
In the first case, birds come and perch, there are a few droppings under the tweeter, and they leave before dark. They do not stay the night. That is a different problem, and it often sits with the internal sound, for example when the internal tweeters are actually playing external sound. This article is not about that case.
This article is about the second case: the birds really do sleep in your house every night, and still do not build. Birds coming and birds settling are two different things. If they stay the night, they have already passed most of the tests. Only the last step is missing.
The usual mistake: thinking the sound is not enough
Most people go straight to changing the internal sound, or adding more tweeters.
I took that detour myself. When something feels wrong, sound is the first thing you blame.
But think about it calmly. The birds found your house. They came through the entrance hole. They come back every night. Calling them in is done. Your entrance and your sound already did that part. What is stuck is the part after: why they sleep there but do not choose your planks.
Adding more sound now means spending more money on a job that is already finished.
There is another mistake, blaming things outside: fewer insects in the area, or the house next door pulling birds away. You cannot control any of those. If your birds sleep in your house and then go and build somewhere else, the answer is inside your own house.
Know which birds are coming back
Kiew Meng Kui, who teaches the Swiftlet Signature Masterclass (SSM) with me, likes to say that old birds do not care about much. Watch the new birds.
Old birds staying in your house are what you got right in the past. Whether new birds settle is what your house is like now. In the first few days after new birds come in, they are testing your house. If the whole group keeps chasing each other and playing inside, your chances are good. If they split up, one here and one there, and stop playing, most of them leave in the end.
So when you see a lot of birds at night, do not celebrate and do not panic yet. Find out who they are. Whether they settle takes a while to see, not one or two days.
Droppings tell you more than the birds do
Birds move around. Droppings do not lie.
A spot with only a few scattered droppings usually means the birds have just started sleeping there. When a nest base starts to appear on top, they are pairing up and getting ready to build. A big pile of droppings with no nest above it often means young birds that are not ready to pair yet. That is not a fault in the house. It is just not time yet.
One more simple trick: find a pile of droppings and look straight up. Where a bird gets blocked or stops, that is where the droppings fall. It is very accurate.
If you want to know what is happening now and not what happened before, wash that wall clean first, then go back after a while. Old droppings are history. New droppings are the present.
The planks are the step people skip
Whether a house can keep its birds often comes back to the nesting planks. Houses with birds have plank problems, and so do houses without birds.
Dirty planks, mouldy planks, too much nest base left behind after harvest, years of sprays soaked into the wood: the birds will try them, and then decide not to stay. Wipe a plank with a wet cloth and look at the colour of the water. You will understand.
How to check the planks, and why new planks often do not fix it, is covered in more detail in Swiftlets nesting on the walls, not the planks.
The order to check
1. Where the droppings fall. Which piles on the floor, and what is above each one.
2. The planks. Compare the area with nests and the area that has always been empty.
3. Anything blocking the flight path. Things hanging down, things too close to the planks. Birds stop there.
4. The sound, last. Only touch the sound when the first three are fine.
One thing matters a lot: never knock on or replace a spot where birds already live. When you remove or wash anything, start where no birds live. Knock on an occupied spot and those birds leave. You would be betting the birds you have on birds you might get.
None of these steps needs you to spend money first.
When equipment comes in
Only when the planks really are dirty do you need something to clean them. We use our own Meranti+ Nesting Plank Enhancer. It was made for nesting planks, to deal with mould and old smells, and you spray it on.
If you want to try one small step first and watch how the birds react, you can also try our Nest Boosting Hormone (NBH), a hormone, pheromone and aroma blend. Spray it on the walls and floor. Do not spray the planks. I explained why in Should you spray hormone on nesting planks.
Once you see a little reaction from the birds, we find the root together. That is the order the MDK Swiftlet House Diagnosis Method is built on: diagnosis first, prescription second.
Your next step
Tomorrow morning, after the birds have flown out, go up once and take three photos: the plank area with nests next to the area that has always been empty, the biggest piles of droppings on the floor, and what is directly above those piles. Then stand on the floor and record a short clip of the sound inside the house.
Send them to us on WhatsApp and I will take a look, whether it is the planks, the flight path, or really the sound this time. There is no charge and you do not need to buy anything first. After we look, if we need more information, we will ask you. You do not need to prepare everything at once.