Purple Martins sitting on top of their house prior to banding. Photo by Kori Smith
Four Amish Farms, Two Days, 580 Purple Martins Banded
On July 12 and 13 Goose Pond staff and volunteers assisted Dick Nikolai, Wisconsin Purple Martin Association board member, master bander, and Purple Martin expert, with the banding of 580 Purple Martins at four Amish farms around Dalton in Marquette County. Because of Dick and Madison Audubon’s efforts, 2,823 young Purple Martins have received flashy new anklets in five years beginning in 2017 (2017 Purple Martin banding), and only missing 2020. Dick estimates that the statewide Purple Martin population is approximately 30,000, meaning we banded around 1.9% of the statewide population in two days!
Goose Pond staff and volunteers carefully lower the first Purple Martin house of the banding sessions. Photo by Jenny McGinley
On July 12, we started at the Jacob Petersheim farm and banded 168 young ranging from 8 day old pink chicks to 29 day old fledglings itching to get out of our hands and into the sky. The Petersheim family cares for seven T-14 houses, each with 14 large nesting compartments (98 nesting cavities total!). It was amazing to see that 97 of the 98 nesting compartments were occupied by Purple Martins, with not a single cavity overtaken by a European House Sparrow nest or other common invaders. These impressive stats would not have been achieved without the dedication of the Amish Purple Martin stewards who monitor the nesting cavities and remove nest materials of unwanted species like House Sparrows and European Starlings.
Our next stop on July 12 was at Ora Mast and his son’s farm where there were five T-14 houses and four artificial gourds, making 74 nesting compartments total. At the Mast farm, we banded a total of 129 young martins from 40 pairs with young still in the boxes. Ora and his son make and sell high quality T-14 boxes and poles with cables at their Farmer’s Repair Shop (let us know if you’d like their contact information to get your own box).
Volunteer Holly Hilliard, taking a young Purple Martin out of its nesting cavity to be banded. Photo provided by Holly Hilliard
The history of using gourds for Purple Martin nesting cavities goes back hundreds, maybe even a thousand of years to the Indigenous peoples whose practice of hanging hollowed-out gourds influenced the Purple Martins to nest in human-made structures rather than the wild. That tradition persists today for both humans and the Purple Martins. These large swallows benefited from the lack of predators near human settlements, and quickly became dependent on the hollow gourds that native peoples hung around their villages. Whether for their beautiful, chortling calls, their consumption of pesky flying-insects, or for the alarm calls stimulated by unfamiliar faces, native peoples enjoyed and worked for their presence, much like Purple Martin ‘landlords’ today. As the Amish ‘landlords’ have told us in the past: they love the Purple Martins, and the Purple Martins love them!
The group of Goose Pond staff and volunteers, along with Dick Nikolai (kneeling) in front of the T-14 houses at Sloping Acres Greenhouse. Photo by Brenna Marsicek / Madison Audubon
On July 13 we banded 109 young birds from 31 compartments at six T-14 houses at Sloping Acres Greenhouse. We ended the afternoon on a high note at an Amish farm on Golden Road, as the farm had the most unfledged Purple Martins. At the first T-14 box with four gourds alone, we banded 53 young! Out total for the afternoon was 174 banded young birds from four T-14 houses (56 compartments and 16 gourds).
We missed out on banding a good number of successfully fledged broods at each banding site, so our banding numbers do not represent the total individuals reared in these houses.
A huge thank you goes out to all of the volunteers who made this large banding operation run smoothly and efficiently. It takes a full team to band hundreds of birds in two days, and not a single volunteer was left without a job: we had a bander, a data recorder, a person to open the bands, someone to raise and lower the boxes, a person to keep track of which birds go into which compartment (there are 14 compartments in each house!), and a half dozen people to carry birds to the banding station. With all this help, we are able to band one bird per minute at full capacity, which means more banded birds and less time away from their nests! We would also like to thank Dick and the Purple Martin landlords for all they do for this striking species. Dick will submit the data we gathered to the Bird Banding Laboratory, and it will be used to study migration, survivorship, health of birds, productivity, phenology, and more.
Two Purple Martin houses at the Golden Road farm. Photo by Rob O’Connell
Written by Emma Raasch, Goose Pond Sanctuary seasonal employee
