Excited for the season ahead

Being just weeks away from the 2020 season I am excited for martins to return to my home colony. Even more so I am looking forward to hear from landlords that have added ChirpyNest too their site and to see how the birds take to their new modern cavity. I get to experience the thrill of the first arrival many times over both before and after my first birds arrive.

In the summer of 2015 I spent many hours thinking and build the first prototypes. That winter I built the first ChirpyNest houses, the four compartment stack house pictured below. My intent was for this to be the ChirpyNest house I would offer for sale to other landlords looking for a better system. From some left over parts, I fabricated one single ChirpyNest that I added to my rack just for fun. My first Martin showed up on March 16 that year and hung around for a short time. I was all nerves that spring because I didn’t even know if martins would use the design I had spent so much time developing. Eight days later a couple of martins showed up. When this ASY male landed on my house I could barely hold my excitement. When he later landed on the single unit all the work was rewarded. I still had a long season ahead and still didn’t know if the birds would use the housing but just having them on the house was enough.

As the season got going all my worries and wonders subsided as 12 of the 33 ChirpyNest cavities offered that season were claimed and had eggs laid, including the one single unit. It wasn’t long into the season that I abandoned the further development of the stacked ChirpyNest in favor of the single units. The adaptability and versatility of the single made it much more practical. I also found that the martins would claim multiple cavities in the stacked units, laying a single egg but not incubating it. This is common in multi cavity housing. I learned the long way that individual cavities was a better way to go.

2020 starts the fifth year for ChirpyNest at my colony. It is the third year for landlords in other parts of the Martin’s range to be using ChirpyNest. Over 100 sites are using ChirpyNest as of today. Some have one or two and some have over 25 ChirpyNest cavities offered. I ask and hope that all of you will let me know when your martins arrive and when they check out your ChirpyNest.

I’m counting down the days to my first arrival and anxious to hear from ChirpyNest landlords down south to let me know when their martins check out their ChirpyNest. Nothing beats the arrival of the first Martin, but hearing of the first martins to check out ChirpyNest at sites across the country comes close.

This is the first Purple Martin to ever visit a ChirpyNest house.

March 24, 2016. First visit to a single ChirpyNest house

Great horned Owl

On a June evening, I watched as my martins began settling in for the evening. Suddenly a commotion began and as many purple Martin landlords can relate, I knew a predator was about. It was then that the great horned owl soared just over me and perched in this spruce tree. With a red-lining battery on my I-phone I was able to get a decent video in the growing darkness all the while expecting the phone battery to die. On a normal night this owl appears 20 to thirty minutes later than it did on this night when there is total darkness.

I cringe the arrival of this owl on the evenings that I am watching for it. It’s not if it shows on a particular summer night but when. An owl visit is normal activity when a Martin colony is located within an owls territory, or as in my case, an owl moves into the territory of an established Martin colony. My colony was established in 1996 and Until around 2010 I had no owls that I knew of or heard. The area surrounding my neighborhood has since become more conducive habitat for owls and as a result my colony suffered and declined by almost 70%. Since developing ChirpyNest, My Martin colony is rebounding and is now back to the level of occupancy before the owl(s) moved in.

There is not a lot one can do to prevent owls from visiting their colony. It is absolutely wrong to harm a native predator like an owl, nor would I even think of it. Sadly there are those that would, despite that it is illegal. Martins and owls as well as hawks have coexisted forever and will continue to do so in the natural world. We provide housing for purple martins and build up a colony to levels that are a magnet for predators. Some predation is expected and is all part of nature. If predation gets to be more than a Martin landlord can bear, as it did for me, we must innovate. At first I added owl guards in the form of wire baffles designed to prevent the owl from landing at the entry of a gourd or house. These baffles did not do it for me. The next option was to enclose the whole rack in a cage. I was not willing to go to that length so I completely re-thought the housing model and that is how ChirpyNest came into being. 2020 will be year number 5 for The ChirpyNest system at my colony.I hope to increase the number of nesting pairs to at least that of my colony in its peak years of 2004 and 2009 when I had 79 active nests and fledged just over 300 young. I don’t expect to GHO to move out of the area. ChirpyNest has been well worth the time and effort I have put into it and will be the key to reaching this goal and keeping GHO’s from reducing my numbers.

Catching up on some Martin work.

As Thanksgiving rolls in I have been busy updating some pages on the website. Doesn’t take long for things to get outdated. I am also making some sense of all the data collected regarding the temperature inside ChirpyNest, compared to troyer gourds and Super gourds. The simple conclusion is the Plastic gourds are hot. Even with vent ports plastic gourds build heat early in the day and remain several degree over the air temperature, especially with the sun shining. ChirpyNest temperatures keep within a degree of the air temperature . How much does this affect the young and the martins themselves? I think it has a big effect.

One of the things I did this past season was to eliminate plastic gourds and replace them with ChirpyNest. I did this in part to monitor Jumpers at my site. In 2019 I had zero young to jump, sometimes referred to as premature fledging. I was super nice to inspect my colony every time and not find baby birds on the ground. I of course look forward to future years to see if this continues.

Another thing I noticed was that I was able to inspect nests up to the day the young fledged. I did not intend to study this but as I was doing checks on poles with brood of varying ages I just continued checks of all brood without any problem of the young fledging early. This will be something I intentionally look at next season.

Keep checking back as I will be adding to the site in coming weeks, especially posting the data from the temperature study. In the meantime Here are some Spot check temperatures from 2019.

These readings from October 2 at 6:48 pm. October was a hot month.

These readings are from July 15 at 12:46 PM. Horizontal = troyer horizontal. Vert = Supergourd. CN1 and CN2 are chirpyNest houses and air = outside temperature.

Summary for 2019 Purple Martin Season

One of my favorite pictures of the 2019 season. This was taken only a couple days before fledging. My last birds fledged on the last day of July. As I write this, on September 14, 2019, I still have one Martin that returns every evening to roost. It returns punctually at 8 pm or just before always roosting in either ChirpyNest cavity # 13, 14 or 15 on pole F. All other housing has been cleaned and put up for the season. I have left this pole intact to accommodate my nightly tenant. When she (or he if it is a fledgling male from this year), does leave I hope it travels with the barn swallows that remain or maybe there are other martins that it spends the days with.

Taken late in the season, my son Zachary captured this great shot of a young one being fed in an extra vertical ChirpyNest. At the time only two other cavities had young and fledging took place two days later.

Overall the 2019 Martin season was a huge success. My colony increased form 176 young from 49 cavities in 2018 to 211 young from 57 cavities in 2019. This despite nightly owl visits. My resident owl(s) will hunt and dine from atop my Martin poles. With the ChirpyNest, if the owl strikes, I firmly believe my birds are staying put in the deep slanted cavity. Any birds that are outside late are vulnerable to attack but I have in fact built my colony back from a devastating decline after developing ChirpyNest.

This year I replaced all plastic gourds with ChirpyNest. This move resulted in zero jumpers at my site. It was a joy to not find young martins on the ground at the pre fledging age. ( I did have one incidence of a 4 or five day old on the ground under pole H and a 15-18 day old on the ground from pole F. The occurrence of this on the same afternoon makes me think it was the doings of an unattached male juvenile .) ChirpyNest is a very well ventilated cavity and the temperature does not vary far from the air temperature. I have spent the last five months doing a temperature study that convinces me that heat and ventilation is a factor with jumpers. From the data and observations Ive gathered , plastic gourds such as the Troyer horizontals and super gourds which are of high quality, heat up when the sun hits them and remain many degree higher than the outside air during the day. I can only imagine how hot thin, lower quality plastic gourds can get. I am finishing up the gathering of this temperature data and will post separately about this.

My other colony at the Virginia Highlands Community College statistically had an even more productive season than mine. I did observe a resident coopers hawk at this site this year. From the numbers, I don’t think it had a negative effect on the season but I imagine there were fledglings that became victims after leaving the nest. Observation is about the only way to know its effect for sure but I am not there enough to find this out.

Here are links to the 2019 martinwath data for my home site and the VHCC site for my coloniesas well as summaries for the last 5 years of these colonies. I have also updated my colony history with the 24 year colony summary. These links are also available from the navigation bar under colony data and research.

For the 2020 season I will have 250 ChirpyNest available for sale and I have developed a new locking tab for the door. Order early or at least let me know you want some so that I can reserve yours.