Purple Martin Forum

No plans to add more housing as we live in town with a typical sized back yard. Have one house on each back corner of the lot. They also poop all over my house so I think 16 compartments is enough! I do wonder why they bother flying all the way up north. Most years they show up and we still have sno...

A quick update from southern SK, Canada The first year was 2018 with a small house given to us. We had 4 pair that year. I now have two houses I built with a total of 16 nest boxes. (search my name on the forum if you want to see them) I went up a ladder to have a look today and all rooms are taken,...

Such a great story! Thanks for posting it. I am north of you in SK, Canada and I will be putting my houses up tomorrow. The birds arriving will be in bad shape I assume as they came through such bad weather to get here. We had the same storms and there is still snow on the ground here. I wish the bi...

Had 14 out of 16 nest boxes occupied.
40 fledglings.
After a terrible start to the season when most early arrivals died in a cold snap it ended up being a good season!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5kW5hC7mAE

Glad you are having a successful season.
We had a terrible start here in SK as well and lost more than half the birds but are now on our way to the best year yet.
Sparrows were plentiful at the beginning but are so few now I removed the trap 2 months ago.

My housing was over run with mites a couple years ago. I was a rookie landlord and did not know what to do. Thanks to the advice from this forum the problem was quickly resolved with some sevin dust. I used a turkey baster as recommended and applied some into each nest. I did not do a nest change. T...

I am glad you had success feeding the Martins. I am also in SK and went through the same weather. I could not get them to take any of my supplemental feeding and many died. I have a thread here about it. Like you I got some crickets from the pet store and they were mostly too small to be of any use....

UPDATE: What a difference a few days of good weather has made! Out of the 12 nesting pairs we lost about 60% and I was never able to get them to eat any of my food offerings. However we have now had 5 days of great weather and the forecast continues to be very nice and flying bugs are active again. ...

The weather has finally turned for the better, warmer and sunny but still windy. I was able to get some crickets but they are not sold locally here. They were very small and just blew away in the wind when we were flicking them with plastic spoons. I ordered 1000 large crickets online but they wont ...

This is my fourth year and we had 12 pair in our two houses. I am located in Canada and the weather has been very bad. For over a week now it has been cold, rainy, cloudy and windy and the birds are not finding insects to eat. They are wasting away and about half have died. Today the remainder are s...

I use a cheap pump up Crosman rifle with a 3-9 x 40 scope on it. The most important thing I can recommend is pacing off the distance you plan to be shooting from and then set up a practice target and practice getting your scope set up and then shooting until you can hit a golf ball sized target with...

I leave them alone during the winter. Winter is hard up here so i cut them some slack. Removed 100 during the season last summer though.

Thanks all for the advice. The old Sevin dust I found did the trick. It has been one week since I noticed the mite infestation and put Sevin in the nest boxes and todays nest checks showed zero mites. That stuff sure did the trick!

Turns out my wife had an old bottle of Sevin powder that was given to her years ago in the garden shed. I put some into the nests and cleaned the exterior off using a spray bottle filled with hot water and some dish detergent. I will check in a couple of days to see if it was effective. How long sho...

It looks like Sevin (carbryl?) is not available in Canada.
Are there any other good options for dusting the nesting material?

I did a nest check today and the houses are swarming with mites. They are everywhere and got all over me. I needed to wash my clothes and take a shower. Can the mites infect humans?? I a only a second year landlord. Did not notice many mites last year and did not plan on intervening at all. But this...

I won't be adding any more housing, I figure 16 nests is plenty for a small yard. They are pretty noisy at times and poop all over the place and I don't want to have upset neighbors. I'm sure not everybody appreciates them as much as we do. I partially monitor and intervene. I open up the houses onc...

There are 5 pair in one house and 4 in the other so they seem to not prefer one over the other. They do like the power lines and perch on them quite a bit. As far as sparrows, I shoot the odd one with a pellet rifle but I get most of them with a repeating trap I made. 55 of them have been removed th...

Our first attempt was last year and we had 4 pairs. This year there are 9 pairs. Hopefully next year we will have more (there are 16 nest trays total) Currently 21 eggs and 17 hatch-lings (Canada so they are well behind the southern birds) The houses are at each back corner of the yard about 11 ft h...

I purchased a pellet rifle last year for the same reason. Today I shot a male HOSP that was raising hell with the Martins and now peace has returned to the back yard. This HOSP would not go anywhere near my repeating trap so the gun was necessary. My advice is to watch some you-tube videos to learn ...