The first waves of purple martins — the so-called “scouts” — will be arriving any day now. In anticipation, homeowners and landowners across Georgia are performing an annual chore — hanging gourd houses and erecting elaborate “condos” for the birds.
Most of the sleek, elegantly plumed, fork-tailed martins departed in August for winter homes as far south as Brazil. Over the next several weeks, they will return for their nesting season that commences in late March.
Many of the older birds will be coming back to the same backyards where they nested previously. Younger birds nesting for the first time also will be checking out available backyard housing.
Colonies of purple martins once nested in natural tree hollows, old woodpecker holes and cliff crevices, but since about 1900 they have come to rely on the gourd houses and apartmentlike martin houses that people provide for them. As such, a strong association has developed between the purple martin and people, a relationship that distinguishes the bird from all others in Georgia — except perhaps for the Eastern bluebird, which is a year-round resident. In a few weeks, folks also will be getting their bluebird boxes ready for the nesting season.
Purple martins return the kindnesses of people by providing endless hours of daytime entertainment as they dart and flit about in pursuit of high-flying insects, and their babies constantly poke their little heads out of nest boxes in anticipation of a meal or just out of sheer curiosity. Ornithologists, however, say a purple martin’s appetite for mosquitoes is mostly a myth — martins actually eat few of the pesky insects.
Ken and Connie Walters, who live on seven acres near Byron in Peach County, are some of the thousands of Georgians getting ready for purple martins. Ken, a retiree, this week was hanging his nearly 100 gourd houses on high poles in his yard. “I prefer to use natural gourds instead of artificial ones,” he said.
His gourd houses, he said, attract some 75 to 80 pairs of nesting purple martins each season — one pair to a gourd. “I hang extra gourds for the young birds that will nest for the first time.”
After the birds depart in late summer, he takes down the gourds, removes old nesting material and cleans them with a weak bleach solution. He stores them in his barn until late January, when he hangs them up again.
It’s a routine he has been performing for 30 years, “and the martins keep coming back year after year,” he said.
In the sky: The moon, new on Wednesday, will be a thin crescent low in the west just after dark on Thursday, said David Dundee, an astronomer with the Tellus Science Museum. Venus rises out of the east about three hours before dawn and will appear near the moon Sunday morning. Jupiter is high in the southwest at dusk and sets about three hours later. Saturn rises out of the east about four hours before sunrise. Mercury and Mars cannot be easily seen.
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