Every Fledgling Could Be Someone's Only Female next season
From: Ken Kostka, Edinboro, PA
Date: 9/16/99
After trying for twenty years to attract breeding martins to my parent’s property 20 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, PA, I finally succeeded in attracting one SY pair in 1999. I suspect this was due in large part to an overall great breeding year in ‘98, since I wasn’t really doing anything different, with the exception of having added a T-14 and some jumbo-sized natural gourds to the site. The closest active colony is a small, 6-8 pair site 8 miles north in a wooden house. Interestingly, although my SY pair initially hung out in the T-14, they ended up nesting in a large, 13” natural gourd hung right under one of the T-14 sections. There were no gourd-nesting martins within 25 miles in 1998 or before, so my hunch is that the wooden house is what initially appealed to them, but once they had a chance to become familiar with the huge natural gourds, they preferred them. Three additional subadult males hung around for the better part of a month, and they would occasionally bring in other SY females, but no other SY females stayed, so I ended up with just the one SY pair. This made me realize just how important every martin is, especially every SY-F, especially in areas where martins are not abundant. It takes just one SY female to start a colony site; every HY (hatching year) martin could potentially be someone’s only SY female the following year – an SY female that colonizes a new area and becomes the matriarch of someone’s colony site. So it’s important to manage properly in order to fledge as many healthy martins as possible. Starling and House Sparrow control, nest changes, predator guards – these are all important in fledging as many martins as possible to help repopulate the species and make Purple Martins abundant again.
Ken Kostka, Purple Martin Conservation Association
