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First Nest Check of Season

4/30/2016

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Beautiful day in the high 60's at Hammonasset. We brought nesting material (pine needles) to put in nesting compartments, and more scrambled eggs and eggshells in case there were enough martins to try to teach the emergency feeding techniques (there were too few martins available to work on the training)
Every nest box received a handful of pine needles, made to be as bowl-like as possible (using our fist and twisting motion to form cup).  Although it is too early to expect any real martin nests, we did find several house sparrow nests, one with eggs. This is not good news, the nests were removed and we attempted 
to trap the sparrows, but they won today. We will be back.

We did realize that the crows have figured out that we are delivering food to the martins, just as we were pulling away, the crows high tailed it to the feeding trays and helped themselves to the scrambled eggs....ahh who can blame them, the breakfast buffet!





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Meet a Purple Martin Returnee

4/19/2016

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This returning male has an orange band which means it was banded previously from Hammonasset at Chase Pond. This photo was taken at the colony at the Nature Center. I recently read that when a baby martin fledges...the other adults in the colony fly and harass and intimidate him. They want to discourage him from returning there next year to breed, not enough room at the colony if all the babies came back home.  Guess they sort of discouraged him, he came back to Hammo, but not the same colony.
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More Feeding Attempts

4/11/2016

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 Since the weather remains cold, and reports of other landlords  losing martins because of bad weather, we decided to make additional attempts at emergency feeding. We've been down to Hammo with scrambled eggs, crickets and egg shells. Since we could not get a bird to catch anything on the fly, we added a feeding platform for each colony and we put the eggs there for them. We also added some food near the entrance to the units that we have opened.

​Two days later, we returned, the food was missing, hopefully the martins have eaten it. There were no signs of the martins.
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Two of the Scouts from 2016

4/6/2016

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These are photos of our returnees taken on April 5th 2016. These birds were banded, one from Hammo and one from a nearby colony in Clinton. The lower picture shows the green band but on by Ct DEEP officials. It is difficult to read but the color denotes the colony (green is Hammo by the Nature Center and the number is identifiable when you enlarge the image.)


UPDATE: the banding on the top bird according to DEEP records was banded 4 years ago. This means that this tiny bird has flown more than 32.000 miles in his lifetime.
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First Attempt at Emergency Feeding

4/5/2016

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Concerned about the returning scouts that we saw at Hammo over the weekend, we bought some crickets and boiled up some eggs and headed down to try our hand at flinging in attempt to get the attention of the martins and get them to feed. With temperatures barely reaching 40 today and colder temps the day before we know they have not been able to find food.

We began throwing the food towards them, and although they appeared interested, we had no takers. We left putting the rest of the hard boiled eggs and crickets on their front porches hoping they would feed after we left. We will try again tomorrow.

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Welcome to the 2016 Purple Martin Season

4/4/2016

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They're Back!!!

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While Terry and I were at a Purple Martin conference in Pennsylvania, we received our first phone call from Ranger Russ at Hammonasset to tell us that our first martins had returned!

The next day we went to Hammo to open some of the houses so they could find shelter. The first martins back are called Scouts...they are the more experienced birds and they come by to "scout" out the housing situation and pick out their housing. We don't usually open the houses this early because they will be inundated with sparrow and possibly starlings, both invasive birds that wreak havoc on the martins.  Most landlords that spoke at the workshop we attended suggested that opening some of the houses early encourages the martins to stay and makes managing the sparrows a reasonable task.  
So the season has started, and we are already concerned. The weather has taken a turn for the worst, it has now snowed for 2 days and martins need dry weather over 50 degrees to catch flying insects. We know they are already depleted and tired from their trip up North.  We are considering trying our new knowledge of emergency feeding sooner than we expected.
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