The Birds & The Bees: Purple Martins 2024 & Building a Waterfall Birdbath

This year's purple martin season just flew by. I wasn't able to spend as much time with them as I usually did in previous years, but it was enough to do nest checks and make sure there were no major issues. I wasn't able to do nest checks for the last 4 weeks due to some other unforeseen issues, but, my numbers this year at last count were: 82 pair, roughly 310 fledged (without confirmation of the last 8 nests). They all finally left my site during the second week of July.

Yes, I still had my resident GHO show up...she's kinda like Dory in the movie, "Finding Nemo"...she just keeps swimmin' hoping she'll find & catch a martin one night.

I'm sure, in the end, she probably caught a few that exited for the magical "Dawn Song" hours, but at least it wasn't a slaughter. The cages continue to work well, especially with the netting underneath. I had a very determined Sharp-Shinned hawk at the beginning of the season, prior to my mounting of the netting. He/She actually came up inside the cages a couple of times to try to catch a martin. But after mounting the netting on the racks, he/she never attempted that again.

Great Horned Owl - May 6, 2024 - 9:00 PM

At the beginning of the season, the purple martins tend to be very noisy - especially during the daytime hours. I've actually seen the owl perched in a tree in the distant treeline during the day, while she observed my colony. Probably planning her strategy. She really does try to figure out the perfect angles.

Great Horned Owl, stalking my colony from the ground. May 6, 2024 - 9:12 PM

You really have to give her an A+ for effort.

Great Horned Owl, stalking my colony from the nearby perching rack. May 7, 2024 - 4:38 AM

I had been meaning to construct a new bird bath and an elderly gentleman that came by to pick up some stuff ended up pushing that decision up in my priority list when he accidentally backed over my old bird bath arrangement. I had been itching to re-do it anyway, given the bird bath arrangements my friends were sharing on social media. So, very frankly, after he destroyed my original setup, I may have secretly cheered. Ha!

Given the various issues I had with my old bird bath (and lessons-learned), I had a better plan this time.

I wanted:

- a 'waterfall' bath with an upper & lower tray;

- more water capacity in the trays themselves;

- a large capacity water container (so I didn't have to keep refilling the trays during extreme heat) ;

- a pump to circulate the water; and

- a better location for birdie access and out of the way of people who should no longer be driving a vehicle.

I found the perfect trays on Amazon (thanks to a friend's help) and hubby and I decided to make a trip to our local hardware store to try to find ideas on how to make the water supply system more self-sustaining. After quite some time walking around, a store associate helped us find a nifty item called a "bulkhead flange". OMG, this thing is awesome! It has a gasket on one side to help seal the hole and a lock nut on the other side so you can tighten it. We drilled the right size hole in the bottom of the tray, mounted it, then used a small length of PVC pipe to set the level of the water for the lower tray. I placed some screen over the hole and used a zip tie to hold it in place. It filters a lot of stuff out before it can get into the water-holding bin.

The bin below is a 20-gallon storage container (Walmart). We bought a 45 & a 90 degree elbow and enough 1.5" PVC to make sure if we made a mistake, we still had some remaining with which we could make more mistakes.

We then cut a short, 6" piece of PVC pipe to add to the 90 degree elbow, for the water return. It's also fitted into the elbow, just tight enough that I can remove the bin lid and reach in and twist it off when I decide I need to clean the bin.

After finding a highly-rated solar powered pump, we connected tubing and the flow control. I thought we would need a flow control since the pump has a 350 gph flow, but turns out we ended up not needing the controller.

The black outflow gadget mounted in the picture below was able to be mounted to the tubing and it is held in place by some cool rocks I was able to find.

I then placed the pump into the filled bin and we drilled the access hole large enough to hold the water supply line and the power cable that runs to the solar panel.

After some "proof of concept" stuff (as Mr. Freeze likes to call it), we have landed on the final product. It did take awhile to get the tilt on the top bath just right and we ended up using some of the leftover composite decking materials to support the bottoms of the trays (they're water-proof & will last forever).

We used cinder blocks on either side to support the planks & trays and my grandsons camouflaged the blocks with our cool rocks.

My purple martins' reactions to it were rather funny - they're such curious buggers! They would do low & slow flying passes to check it out, but never did land.

Best of all, we have a 5-star rating from our many customers. They think the price - "pose for a photo" is more than fair. Clicking on the pictures will launch them into a larger window for better viewing.