Look What Mother Nature Dragged In

 I have been keeping a log book of all my purple martin arrivals and nest checks since time began. Okay, well really since I became a landlord in 2007 with my first pair. I love writing in it each season with my mechanical .09 pencil. Something about writing with a pencil that I just love. I start each season by writing on a new page, "Season 20XX". Then, I start writing when the first purple martin arrives. 

This year, my notations began on March 4th with the first ASY male arrival. The only others so far:

• Mar. 12th - 3 martins here;
• Mar. 14th - 6 martins here - supplemental feeding;
  
• Mar. 20th - 11 martins here - supplemental feeding;
• Mar. 21st - rain;
• Mar. 22 & 23rd - 68 & 70 degrees - over 25 martins here.
• Apr. 1st - too many to count....over 50 at least.
  

As I scanned through my notebook to see what was happening on these same dates in past years, I wondered if my son or my grandsons would someday find my Purple Martin notebook and be curious enough to read through it. I'm sure the grandsons would get a good laugh reading some of my notes, knowing how bird-crazy their grandmother was. I wonder if they would marvel at the handwriting and feel a warmth of familiarity and that will open up a flood of memories? The same way I loved to read the notes that my grandmother wrote in her letters and especially in her Bible? I've been feeling rather down about aging and thinking about my own mortality lately and the best way for me to work through stuff is to write about it. Not today, but soon. Moving on.....

Today, there are more than I can count but I'm sure I have over 50 martins now.

Yesterday evening during my walk, I saw my martins zooming just over the tops of my native wild plum grove. There are thousands of these moths swarming the fragrant, snow white blooms. I ran to the house and grabbed my camera and of course, by the time I returned, most of the martins were headed to bed, but I did manage to catch a few on video catching a snack for bedtime. I LOVE seeing this - it's one of the many reasons I love to talk about native plants and how many insects they host. And those insects are now feeding many of the birds here today. Now you can see why I preach, "GROW NATIVE"!

Here's a short video where I managed to capture a few purple martins & tree swallows snagging a moth before bedtime.

 Not only are the purple martins swarming in, so are the tree swallows. I have a LOT more tree swallows than I have nest boxes for them. Check out how many TRES are twittering around my fields right now in the video above.

In 2021, a bluebird and tree swallow pair nested in this same paired configuration and last year, I had 2 tree swallow pairs nesting back-to-back in those same houses. According to the 'rule' book, when setting up tree swallow grid, they need about 100' between their nest boxes, but we love to break the rules here. 

This past weekend, I decided to take my last two spare nest boxes out of the garage and pair them with a couple of nest boxes on other posts.The new nest boxes certainly weren't doing anyone any good in the garage, so why not find out if lightning will strike 3 or 4 times on Gobbler's Knob? 

In the past 2 days, I've also discovered that I have 2 pairs of nesting bluebirds! After the Polar Vortex of 2021, our local bluebird population was devastated. Where I had had 3 - 4 pairs of nesting bluebirds every year prior, I had none in 2021 and only 1 pair last year. I was thrilled to find 5 blue eggs in one nest and 2 eggs in another nest yesterday, and I encountered a male bluebird guarding another nestbox north of my house. Keeping my fingers crossed this is the year they rebound!

Won't You Be My Neighbor

Today was one of those days where it seemed like all the stars aligned and all the forces in the universe came together to make everything just perfect with hardly any effort at all. As David Gray, put it in the song, Babylon, "Saturday I'm running wild, and all the lights are changin' red to green." That was my day. 
My purple martins have had a rough week - the rain and cold weather have not been optimal for them to find insects. Along with all the sub-adult arrivals the last few days, the adult males have also had to fight off the teenagers trying to run-away with their females. But, we made it through the worst of the weather, only losing 1 adult male. Today they woke up to a warm, foggy, misty morning and somehow they knew it was going to be a good day to find insects, so while waiting for the weather to clear, they hung out on the racks getting acquainted with some of their new neighbors.
So far, we've had 9 peaceful nights with no Great Horned Owl appearances. We're not missing her at all and today I celebrated our brief reprieve.

While it was warm out, I decided to check on the honeybee swarm that I captured 7 days ago. To my surprise, they had already built comb in about 1/3rd of each of 8 frames. All that work completed in only 7 days. Filled with nectar and pollen, I was mesmerized with the beautiful white comb and the perfect hexagon shapes. I could watch the building of the combs all day long. I've been pretty happy to find this swam seems to be reasonably gentle so far - they're turning out to be good neighbors.

With all the rain we've had, I was thrilled when I noticed all the new milkweed in the bed where we had kept the potted milkweed plants a couple of years ago before moving them out into the fields.  Over 50 new common milkweed plants have sprouted from the broken rhizomes when we pulled the pots out, a few asters and 8 new butterfly milkweeds. Unexpected neighbors, shouldering their way through the mulch and reaching for the hidden sun today. I learned a couple of years ago that common milkweed really likes moist areas and butterfly milkweed prefers dry feet, so if it keeps raining, I'm not sure the butterfly weed will make it here.

But the best surprise of the day came when I noticed a female bluebird going into a nestbox that has been paired with a tree swallow box for the last 2 years and never had any occupants.

I currently have 14 nestboxes for other birds here as well - some of which I've setup with the slotted entrances so the tree swallows can enter them, but the slot keeps the English House sparrow out. Unfortunately, it also keeps the bluebirds out, so I have round hole boxes for them set around the property as well.
When I discovered in Jan. 2018 that this Barred Owl was using this bluebird box on my trail as a lunch & go, I decided to move the box to the field, away from the forest and pair it up with a tree swallow box.

I had heard it would work but wasn't confident of that, since I had witnessed the ferocious battles between the tree swallows and bluebirds in my yard before.
But today, on my perfect day, guess what I found? The tree swallows had 4 little white eggs in their own little nestbox, reserved special just for them and a bluebird pair had moved into the paired nestbox that faces the opposite way and they have 5 eggs. Finally, after 2 years!

What were the odds that everything would come together in such perfect harmony today?
I'm sure we'll eventually see my GHO, we'll have to deal with the evil little flies that kill monarch caterpillars, we'll have to keep watch for varroa mites and English House sparrows.
But today, there was peace & harmony on Gobbler's Knob.  

Purple Martin Season 2019 Has Begun

Two ASY male purple martins arrived on March 10, 2019 this year. This year's arrival is more back in line with my first 10 year average arrivals.

In all the years past, my martins had also arrived with the tree swallows, however, this year, a male tree swallow had actually arrived a week earlier. During the last few days the tree swallows have been swarming the nest boxes in the fields and my blue birds are not really thrilled with their arrivals.
They are such happy, cheerful little birds and love to fly up high with their bigger cousins. I was going to remove this perching pole this year, but since they seem to like it so much, I may have to leave it...I don't want to upset my fabulous sentries!

This year, I'm making more changes. A landlord decided he wanted to retire his colony, so I bought some of his equipment from him - namely another Super System. It is so much easier to do nest checks with the extended cages on these systems than it is with the round Deluxe gourd rack systems, so this year, I'm removing one of the Deluxe systems and by adding 4 more gourds to each Super system, I'll still be able to offer 84 gourds and my nest checks won't be so painful (literally - it was death by a thousand scratches in the round racks).

So, with this system, I'm designing the cages in the same way - since they work so well on the other racks. I'm extending the 4' gourd arms by adding an 18" aluminum angle arm. I drilled 2 holes to mount the extensions to the main arms, with another 2 holes on the very end, where I can mount the cage wire.

Then, I have laid a 6' piece of aluminum angle arms from corner-to-corner. We drilled holes in each end, so I can anchor them down with tie-wraps. This helps support the top cage wire, so it doesn't sag, and these arms are super-light.

Since I've removed one of the Deluxe round racks and I wanted to keep the same number of gourds, I added 1 gourd per arm on each rack, so I'm still at 84 gourds. For the end gourd, I replaced the straight arm with a 45 deg. arm, which effectively points the end gourd back inside the cage.

For this Super system above, I just replaced all the arms with the extra long arms I had purchased from Hilltop and have made it a perching rack / feeding tray / oyster -egg shell feeder. Bob was tired of seeing me stand on my 4-wheeler to try to fill the other tray on my old post, so we converted this one.

For now, I only have 10 martins here, so I'm taking my time and making sure I have everything the way I want it. Lesson-learned: it is super annoying to get into the heat of the summer with jumpers and not be able to easily put them back into their nests. This Great Horned Owl has made my life more difficult but as she has learned and adapted, so have I.
I'm also keeping the Deluxe gourd rack that I took down - you never know, I may change my mind when I retire and put it back up and expand my colony, but for now, I'm pretty happy with offering 84 gourds that are 100% protected from the owl, yet still being able to perform nest checks.
Lookout 2019 - here we come!