Beaumont’s ‘Martin House Man’ best friend of feathered friends
— Howard Orphey, 75, is the landlord many might wish they have.
Unfortunately for those with two legs and opposable thumbs, he caters solely to two-legged, winged occupants.
Martins are his tenants of choice.
The migratory birds, which make their way to the region in February, nesting and raising their young before making the trek back to South America in late November, have a friend in Orphey. He has built them nesting houses from scratch and monitors their growing family progress from a camera mounted inside a multi-unit Martin dwelling outside his home on Pipkin Street in Beaumont’s South Park neighborhood.
He has been building the birdhouses for three years now, after seeing a martin nest outside the furniture refinishing business owned by Patrick McClure, with whom Orphey has worked for years doing upholstery.
“I love birds, and these, they’ve got to have a house,” Orphey told the Beaumont Enterprise. They don’t just build nests up in trees, so they depend on people.”
Before people, the martins would build in existing spaces, like those created by woodpeckers, but given the timber demand and how many trees get cut down, they have become more reliant on people for their nesting spaces, he said.
Orphey makes sure they are protected from competition from other nesting birds by checking and removing their nests, noting that many other birds are less comfortable around people interacting with their nesting sites.
It is simply another way martins are protected by people.
Every day, Orphey watches the birds, watches how the parents feed them, watches as they hatch and grow from the livestream video constantly playing in his house.
The eggs typically take two weeks to hatch, and 26 days or so later, the hatchlings are grown and gone.
By November, the martins — parents and offspring — are gone. The migratory time is sad for Orphey.
“What am I going to do now?” he wonders each year. Most likely, he will take up his other favorite hobby — fishing — until the next wave returns.
Until then, he will tend to their care while they are in the home he has built for them outside his own home.
While Orphey bought a martin house initially, given their expense and wanting to mount more, he researched building one himself.
They have grown from tradiBEAUMONT tional basic structures to those far larger, with multiple nesting rooms.
Last year, he built one that had 32 separate nesting units.
Orphey said he tinkers with new houses all the time, but if he gets down to business, he can complete a house within a day.
Orphey mounted his recent 16room nesting space, a white, fourtiered structure with purple rooftops, a lightning rod topper and model birds perched at the eaves, on a pole reaching more than a dozen feet in the air.
He connected a winch, allowing him to raise and lower the structure to check on the hatchlings.
Each unit is numbered, and Orphey logs the number of eggs and hatchlings in each, so that if one falls out as they grow, he knows the proper nest to which it should be returned.
Pull-out nesting boxes in each allow him to easily remove the nests, setting the eggs and hatchlings safely aside while building a fresh nest from pine needles collected from nearby trees.
He said the nests get lice and mites that can be unhealthy for the babies, so he regularly makes sure they are clean and fresh.
“I can do everything but feed them,” he said, though he’s been working on that as well.
Martins feed solely on insects they catch midair.
Orphey said they wouldn’t touch crickets he tossed out on the ground for them to eat or take to the nest.
He discovered that if he catapults a cricket from a spoon, an adult martin will swoop past and catch it.
Orphey laughed at the suggestion that his caretaking makes him like one of the family.
“I’m just the landlord,” he said.