Purple Martins of Lake Chautauqua

 By David Han
This is a repost from the National Geographic Club magazine at https://foxchapelnatgeoclub.wordpress.com - the other version has photography.

Peering up at the circling birds, Jack Gulvin steadily winds the nest box down while expounding upon their biology and habits to the gathered crowd.  To Gulvin, monitoring and caring for the effervescent purple martins that reside in nest boxes surrounding Chautauqua Lake is a time-consuming yet essential task in maintaining the health of the population.  “I started out as a teenager as a birder”, he says, “back in the good old days when my hearing was good enough that I could hear birds … As a typical birder I never paid any attention to purple martins, as they were semi-domestic.”  But after he was put in contact with Louise Chambers, who publishes the quarterly magazine for the Purple Martin Conservation Association, Gulvin quickly began to learn the skills relevant to the bird colony’s upkeep, such as nest cleaning and behavioral observation.  Jack monitors the population size each year for Chautauqua Institution’s Bird, Tree, and Garden Club, and demonstrates his caretaking regimen each Friday to groups of interested passerby, expounding upon the natural history of the birds in a slight, measured drawl.  Describing the reluctance of the fledgling birds, which are preparing to leave the nest, he jokes “There are a lot of parallels between martin society and human society.  Once [the young martins] get to a certain age they may be larger than their parents.  The parents have to call them from outside to get them to leave the nest.”.  A woman from the assembled group chuckled, “Just like my kids!”.

Holding a week-old martin in his calloused hands, Jack Gulvin notes the worried expressions of the surrounding group.  “A lot of people worry about [handling purple martins]… But it doesn’t do them any harm, and the parents come right back. In fact, it’s probably the number one myth in America today, is the idea that if you handle baby birds they’ll be rejected by the parents.  There’s no truth whatsoever to that statement.”.  The common platitude probably stems from the belief that the parents can detect the scent of humans on their young, but birds, according to Scientific American’s Robynne Boyd, have a relatively weak sense of smell due to their limited olfactory capabilities. 

After winding the birdhouse down the pole, Gulvin unlocks the latch securing each individual nest box within the birdhouse and carefully records the number of young in each.  When he notices boxes with very young birds, he gingerly removes them and places them on a nearby tray.  Because of parasites, such as bird fleas and blowfly larvae, the dried white pine needles that the nest is comprised of must be replaced on a regular basis, as the irritation can drive young to leave prematurely and the blowflies will often kill the youngest nestlings.  Despite the reasoning behind intervention, he told us that many audience members still seemed uncomfortable.  Grinning, Gulvin said “I find that once [the audience] sees the blowfly larvae, there’s no more skepticism.”  Due to the nest maintenance, Gulvin says that the survival rate is increased from 50% to 90% during a good year.  That’s good news for the martins, as they have become nearly dependent upon humans due to their near-domestication; since pre-colonial times, the martins have been housed by humans, ranging from Native American gourds hollowed and hung from trees, to the ornate, custom-fit Amish houses that resemble the Victorian homes along the shore of Lake Erie.  Without the care afforded to them by dedicated naturalists and amateurs, purple martins may disappear from the Great Lakes region for good.