Purple martins are welcome winter visitors
Despite having a 2-ounce body that measures only 8inches long, as well as a slender 15-inch wingspan, purple martins make an arduous flight from Brazil to Houston.
They’re flying perhaps 300 miles a day on a journey of at least 5,000 miles from Brazil, as well as and other South American countries east of the Andes.
Some birds will head over Central America to the Yucatán Peninsula and then fly to Houston across the Gulf of Mexico. Others will continue the flight over Mexico’s inland coast and wind their way up to our city.
Older adult males may already have made the trip and are now scouting neighborhoods for nesting quarters.
They’ll likely go back to last year’s nesting home, leaving younger males to search for new homes. Females and first-year adults born the previous spring will be arriving in February.
Our job is to get our martin houses spruced up for occupancy. The birds are picky about clean living quarters and might reject an unkempt martin house.
They will breed colonially in multi-unit boxes made of wood or aluminum and positioned atop a 12- to 20-foot-tall pole. They’ll also breed in a set of artificial hollow gourds hung from a pole, recalling the gourds Native Americans used to attract martins.
Ancient Native Americans began hanging hollowed-out gourds around their villages to welcome martin colonies. The grateful martins returned the favor by gobbling up flying insects that invaded supplies of drying meat strung around the villages.
The birds also warded off crows that would otherwise raid village crops and stores of corn. Martins and Native Americans thereby enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. But Native Americans surely found comfort in the sweet, gurgling melodies of martins, if not joy in their graceful flight.
When Europeans arrived, purple martins had established a symbiotic relationship with people and had grown to rely on them for nesting homes. The birds had even ceased their ancestral habit of nesting in tree hollows by switching to human-made abodes for nest
ing.
European settlers readily adopted the Native American tradition of welcoming martins by installing multi-unit wooden boxes atop poles at farms and in towns. And the martins again returned the favor by devouring flying insects.
We continue to welcome the birds to our neighborhoods by providing nest boxes. But I wonder, if after their perilously long flight to get here, are purple martins as happy to see us as we are to see them?