Supplemental Feeding at the Tray

It has only been in the mid-40s during the day and low to mid-30s during the night here for a few days.  My martins have been trained to take both flipped food (crickets and scrambled eggs) and food from a feeding tray.

Here's what our morning looked like:

A year or two ago, I wrote this article for the Purple Martin Association of the Dakotas, explaining how I got my martins to take supplemental feeding.  We have had nowhere near the awful weather we had back then when this first started, but I took advantage of some of my experienced martins' desire to feed so they could train the other new arrivals.  It's a "monkey see, monkey do" type thing.  And when martins start feeding, the others see what's going on and join in and I probably have some newly-trained that never were before.

Everyone else shows up too, including the bluebirds, cardinals and yes, even the occasional house sparrow that hasn't had a cross hair on him, yet.

http://www.purplemartindakotas.org/enewsletter0105-rtnvstmnyg.html

Here's a lot of good information on the PMCA forum also:
http://purplemartin.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26878&highlight=