Feathered Friends - Purple Martins

We have lots of birds around the Brickhouse, but some of them are particularly helpful to us.  The top three are Purple Martins, Brown Headed Cow Birds, and Barn Martins.  These birds all perform unique and important roles around the farm.

Of these, Mom’s favorite is the Purple Martin.

Purple Martins are one of the biggest of the swallows, measuring in at roughly 20 cm long beak to tail.  You can recognize them by their slightly forked tail and beautiful acrobatics in the air.  Adult males are solid black with a glossy steel blue sheen, females are dark on their tops with some of the same sheen and light on their bellies. 

Purple Martins are migratory birds (moving between North and South America each year) that like to return to the same nesting place year after year; this habit is called “site fidelity”.  As long as nothing disrupts their breeding/hatching success (such as predators) a pair of purple martins will return to that same site their entire life.

Getting ready to hunt some more after a short visit to the nest!

Purple Martins also possess a quality known as “site tenacity”, this means they can and will fight for their nesting sites.  This is a good thing because they have heavy competition for nesting sites from starlings and sparrows.  While we try to discourage these competitors, without help from the Martins themselves we would never see a successful hatching of Martins.  Part of this competition comes from the fact that all three birds are called “cavity-nesters” and prefer manmade housing of similar size.  While the sparrows are genuinely looking for a home, many times the starlings are looking for surrogate parents for their young and will kick out Martin’s eggs, laying their own in place of them and then leave so the Martins will raise their young.   Since these competitors are not protected or endangered, almost every spring the boys can be seen protecting the Martin houses while the birds are establishing their new nests for the year.

A Male and Female keeping watch over their nests.

The biggest reason we love martins and work hard to attract and protect them is their diet.  Purple Martins are obligate areal insectivores – which is a fancy way of saying they only eat flying insects and they only eat then while flying themselves.  Martins are also generalists (aren’t we all?  I know I love food in general!) which means as long as it flies it is on the menu.  As such they eat a huge variety of insects, including but not limited to: beetles, FLIES, midges, mayflies, bees, wasps, moths, MOSQUITOS, damselflies, grasshoppers, butterflies and leaf hoppers.   We especially love the inclusion of flies and mosquitoes in their diet, and they eat a lot, especially since they can feed their babies up to 60 times per day! 

Martins love to practice their eating aerobatics while we mow the pastures.  They swoop around in front of and behind the tractor as it scares up bugs of all kinds.

Eating is not the only thing these birds do on the fly.  They also drink and bathe while flying!  It is so neat to watch them soaring over the pond and then suddenly dipping lower to skim the water with their beak, leaving a pretty V in their wake.

We so appreciate these marvelous birds, and even go so far as to add them to our list of feathered friends!