Time to get ready for purple martins to arrive
Warmer weather should bring out insects that birds can feast on
Purple martins had not yet arrived during the freezing weeks of early January. And that’s a good thing.
Not because the birds would have frozen to death but because they would have nearly starved from lack of sufficient food, like wasps, butterflies and dragonflies, that become scarce on super-cold days.
Insects, being coldblooded, cannot regulate their body temperature as do warm-bloodied mammals. Under temperatures too cold to warm their bodies, insects snuggle beneath the ground and leaf litter or enter a state of diapause, in which they cease activity.
Just a little warmth will quickly revitalize insects. On a cold day during the first week of January at the San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge, when temperatures rose from the 30s in the morning to
the 60s by midday, I saw butterflies and wasps flying easily through the air — although not enough of them to nourish early arriving martins.
Let’s hope daily temperatures will have warmed up and let loose plenty of insects by the time purple martins arrive in the next few weeks.
It’s time to ready the purple martin nest box.
Adult male martins — aka scouts — will be the first to arrive, as they survey the landscape for available houses where they’ll match up with females arriving later to form breeding colonies. First-year adult males will arrive with females and begin searching for unoccupied martin houses to begin their own martin colony.
Breeding colonies raise chicks in apartmentstyled wooden or aluminum houses placed in open areas of neighborhood yards or by lakes and ponds.
Martins migrate from winter homes in Brazil and other parts of South America east of the Andes. Most fly across the Gulf of Mexico, while others swoop over the landmass through Mexico, covering distances of up to 300-miles a day.
They represent the largest swallows of North America, at about 8-inches long with about a 15-inch wingspan and weighing 1.6 to 2.1 ounces — a golf ball weighs about 1.6 ounces. Males are entirely iridescent purpleblue, females differ with gray tones underneath and first-year males show purple splotches underneath.
Martins are graceful, acrobatic flyers whose arrival to breed in backyard colonial nest boxes reminds us of spring’s renewal of life.
We welcome purple martins to our neighborhoods as people have done since the days when ancient Indians welcomed the birds to their villages by providing hollowed-out gourds for nesting accommodations.
Email Gary Clark at Texasbirder@comcast.net.