Here’s hoping purple martins move in
Purple martins astonish me every year between January and February, as adult males arrive to scout for suitable colonial nest boxes that we conveniently call purple martin houses.
I hope they’ll choose my martin house, as they have every year except last year. I’ve cleaned out their apartment-style nest box, which sits high atop a pole and is perfectly positioned to meet their finicky requirements for an unobstructed view to the nesting compartments as well as easy access to ponds, where they can strafe for dragonflies.
Last year, a few males with sleek bodies in glistening purple-blue plumage soared in circles around my nest box for several days. How elegant they were while flying with wedged-shaped wings and forked tails in a buoyant flap-glide pattern.
But did they select my martin house for nesting? Noooo!
Even when females began arriving, with characteristic purple backs set against gray faces and breasts and grayish-white undersides, their male forerunners refused to invite them to my perfectly designed martin condominium.
Perhaps this year’s males will have a more discerning taste for quality accommodations than did last year’s males.
I’m not inviting purple martins to my beautiful martin house with the expectation that they’ll devour the huge — and hugely annoying — horde of mosquitoes. They don’t eat mosquitoes. I know people say they do, but they don’t.
If you could peek inside a martin’s stomach, you’d see the digestion of such critters as dragonflies, damselflies, beetles and other insects but not mosquitoes, unless they were in the stomach of an eaten dragonfly.
I want purple martins in my yard to hear their dawn song consisting of tuneful chortles and croaks. Nice way to start the day— if they deign to nest in my perfect martin house.
I’m nonetheless astonished that they flew to local neighborhoods all the way from Brazil or other South American locations east of the Andes. They covered at least 300 miles a day and flew across the Gulf of Mexico or overland through Mexico.
Let’s welcome them. American Indians welcomed purple martins by installing hollowed-out gourds at their villages, and European settlers continued the Indian tradition by installing handcrafted martin houses around towns and farms.
Purple martins arriving
east of Rockies now nest almost exclusively in artificial nest boxes or gourds but may also nest in the crannies of traffic signals or lamp poles.
Gary Clark is the author of “Book of Texas Birds,” with photography by Kathy Adams Clark (Texas A&M University Press). Email him at Texasbirder@comcast.net