Purple Martin Festival

Yesterday a sibling and I attended the annual Purple Martin Festival in Otsego. The festival was held at a man's home. In his backyard he had several purple martin apartment homes and many purple martin plastic gourds. I believe he said he had over 30 mating pairs of purple martins. We sat on lawn chairs in the front lawn while purple martins flew back and forth above our heads-how perfect! The speaker was Kelly Applegate who is a wildlife biologist with the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwa. He has many purple martin colonies set up on tribal lands. The purple martin population has declined greatly in the past twenty years. I didn't know that. House sparrows and starlings are a threat to purple martins. These invasive birds will go into the nests and peck at the eggs until they break. This house in Otsego has a sparrow trap. I saw about 5 sparrows in the trap in the morning and about a dozen in the afternoon. I didn't ask what was going to happen to those sparrows but I got a feeling they were doomed. Blowflies are another danger to the purple martin fledglings. They advised replacing the nesting material with fresh pine needles when the babies are a week old and again when they are two weeks old. Purple martins migrate to Brazil. Some fly across the gulf of Mexico and others follow the land to Brazil. Before they leave us for the summer, they get together in giant roosts to fatten up for the trip. Using Doppler radar, ornithologists found the roost. The roosts were so large the heat and the liquid inside these birds showed up on radar. Turns out the roost is on Swan Lake in Todd county. The telephone wires around this lake sag with the weight of all these purple martins. The purple martin people arrange for pontoon rides during roost time. You can go out on the lake at sunset when thousands of purple martins descend to roost for the night. That would be something to see. Besides purple martins, there were talks about chimney swifts and bluebirds. This homeowner had a chimney swift tower. He just put it up this year and already he has a mating pair of chimney swifts in there. He played a recording of the chimney swift call to attract them. They are building a nest. He installed a nestcam in his chimney. He had a television set in the garage where we could see the chimney swifts bringing in sticks and gluing them to the side of the chimney with saliva. I saw them flying. My gosh, they have no tail at all. They look like a fat flying cigar. The bluebird group was there too. He really stressed the importance of looking inside the bluebird houses every week and cleaning out eggs of other species. If you install the bluebird house on conduit and re bar, the squirrels and raccoons cannot climb up there, especially if you wax the conduit once a season. At the end of the day I won a door prize! I won a bluebird house. This prize obliges me to get out there and look at the three bluebird houses I already have up.