Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The purple martins are back.....

Ha! No idea why that worked.....


This is the little guy I spotted today. Artic or Horay Redpol.


First one I have seen in years.


Fortunately I keep a Petersons Birds of the West book within reach at all times!

9 degrees and at least 10" of fresh snow and still falling in the Black Hills

My success attracting martins has been pretty spotty. My plastic gourds have holes too small for starlings, but those stinky sparrows are relentless, tough little boogers. I gave up last year and just let them take over. Might start with a second house this spring. Don't usually see the scouts until at least late April.

The Virginia State Arboretum is about 20 miles away and they have about a dozen houses set up next to seasonal pond that catches runoff from a seep. They also have dozens of bluebird boxes which also attract tree swallows. The interplay between the two competitors is fun to watch, not at all like the knockdown dragouts between sparrows and martins.

Thanks for the reminder. I need to lower my houses and clean them out and have them ready for my early arrivals. Seems like its usually around mid March for us in SW MO.

Thanks Mike!

I'll keep 'em were they are then.

A few just dropped in here. Hungry fuggers.

Trees getting green leaves down in Houston neighborhoods

Mexican quail. They taste good but have less meat than a dove. Not as sweet as robin or killdeer so i give them a pass since my boy scout camping days.

BTW there are many which winter over in West Texas through the low teens and occasional foot of snow at times in this country.

Gee thanks, as if we knew WTF here is.
With lots of kestrels i wonder why robins arent frequent residents.

An old West Texas rancher whos place i killed coyotes on moaned that he never had quail around his ranch house even in good years where he saw many out in the pastures. He said he always wanted to have a nice house covey.
His place was in treeless country west of Andrews and he only had a couple of elms around the ranch house and barns.

I told him he could have all the quail around his place he wanted if he would get rid of the three or four barn owls that hung around all the time.

Crap, literally, when the trees leaf out the white-wings will be back, in most every suburban and urban tree, and everyone's cars will get crapped on again. Ain't quite happened here just yet.

The redbirds started singing from the treetops in the morning about three weeks back, the mockingbird in the yard that's been chasing the house sparrows off of the suet feeder since November was singing this morning too for the first time since they pulled off their last brood maybe September.

My reading comprehension must suck, I was ready to start drinking purple martinis.

What the hell is a purple martini anyways? hmmm

I'm about to give up on the martins coming...I have had a house up for 3 years ....they have come and checked it out bu never had any stay..

Robin’s roost 50yds behind the house. In the late afternoon they resemble a tornadic swarm coming in. Has to be in the hundreds of them. Their droppings totally cover the ground area beneath the tree’s canopy.

here, in East Ky. the martins have been around for a couple of days.

It can take a while. It took us I don't know how many years to start getting martins to stay. Sometimes putting up a 2nd house can help attract them to stay, Once they do, they will return every year.

If they lose their eggs or their young in the nest a pair of martins will abandon the site and never return. These oldest martins returning right now will only return to sites where they successfully bred last year.

So to a purple martin, especially the youngest half of the population which returns a month to six weeks from now, an empty housing site is suspect. OTOH an occupied site means those martins that got there first bred successfully there last year and so that is a safe place to breed. Martins most often will not colonize an empty site until all the occupied sites are full.

Fortunately they ain't very bright.

If you put up a few plastic decoy martins and especially set up a speaker playing the male martin's dawn song (which he uses to attract females) the martins will think your site is occupied and are more likely to stay.

https://www.purplemartin.org/shop/27/attraction-tools/

Cleaning them out makes no difference and may even hurt things. Martins since the beginning of time have nested in cavities that have never been cleaned out.

All martins carry red chicken mites.

When the young hatch a race begins. The young are growing as fast as they can versus the mites reproducing as fast as they can. A baby martin goes from weighing around 4 grams on hatching to weighing around 50 grams, often heavier that their parents, in under three weeks. They literally outgrow their parasite populations. Most every martin nest will be swarming with mites after the nestlings leave, what usually happens is most of these mites hatched too late, the baby martins won the race. When they don't they either die in the nest or, more often jump from the nest before they are ready. Parent martins will feed their young on the ground or wherever they are, but most all of these "fallouts" get nabbed by cats and other predators.

So why not clean out the nest?

The mites are not at the top of their food chain. Other mites, insects and fungi all prey upon chicken mites and the population of these mite predators builds up in the nest as the season progresses.

The short version is not cleaning out old nests prob'ly wont hurt your martins.

After all, the martins themselves prefer places with old nesting material already in there.

For all you guys yipping about dove droppings, I'll do you a big favor. Come dove season I'll blast em outta the sky for you!

Dove hunting is my families favorite hunting activity!




DMc