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!

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.

 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.