Purple Martin Forum

Wow, those other maps seem much better. The one I shared only shows North America and has no forecasting feature.

Thanks for sharing them!
Pat

This is pretty neat: http://hint.fm/wind/ The map shows direction and intensity of wind for North America in real time. Among other things, it's thought that birds generally wait to migrate with favorable winds. Using this map, a landlord might expect some birds to arrive on days with south winds. T...

Hi everyone, I just stumbled onto a nice resource online providing high quality martin footage. It's called BBC Motion Gallery. There are nine videos and all of them were shot in the company of PMCA staff. Most of the video of a primitive natural gourd rack I even got to help with when I was still a...

As part of the PMCA's long-term banding project and a shorter-term research project investigating the breeding behavior of martins, we are seeking the assistance of landlords in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. Last year we banded approximately 700 nestlings in northwestern PA with purple metal band...

Barnmomg, There is a field on all pages (except for some checkout pages) that allows you to specify your member status. I have attached an screen capture of the store with that spot circled. It is up to you to select it as the webpage has no way at this time to figure out your member status automati...

Yes! We set up 3 sites each with a variety of housing and got martins at 2 of them! Last wednesday we conducted a nest check and found the following: At our "Sommerheim Dr." site: There were three eggs in a gourd that an SY-M and an ASY-F had made. In addition to that pair, we have seen as...

The spell checker is working for me. The spell checker uses java which is a program on your end. If you have disabled Java on your machine, this feature will not be available. Our server also does some work using PHP, software on our end. Since it works for me, we can rule out PHP. The Java software...

Ok, i will look into this when i get some time. Could one of you tell me whether you're talking about Private Messages (PM) or emails generated from the forum. About a two weeks ago our sendmail (server program that processes emails from webpages) was broken and we lost many emails. That was a probl...

People can send a private message and them retract it. They can retract it up until the recipient reads it. Emil, it appears that your sender retracted their message before you got there. I just received a private message today, all appears to be working well. If you continue to have problems, pleas...

Absolutely! We have been working diligently to permanently fix the problem. Our present webhosting company has also been assuring us that an upgrade is on the way that would also resolve the problem. This problem is believed to be on the server and beyond our control, and so we can only hope that ou...

This issue has been resolved and all emails are being generated and sent. Please resume normal use of all forms. Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

I am sorry to announce that our web server is not processing email generated from PMCA web forms. That includes email generated through this forum (including activation emails!), the contact webmaster form, info request form, etc. If you need to contact the PMCA webmasters (Tara and/or myself) pleas...

It is not unusual for martins to be later than expected. All of the martins from a given colony do not travel as a group and this explains why a whole colony will not be devastated by weather events such as a hurricane or a tornado that hits a roost city in Brazil. Your colony is a collection of bir...

Dan, We welcome multiple reports. Please send them all. I agree that more data is better than less. Back when we typed scout reports into HTML pages by hand, we saved ourselves much time by having the policy that only the first reports would be shown for any given city. Now with our automated system...

Darryl, I am sorry that the scoutform has given you difficulty two years in a row. It is not, by any means, a personal attack, I am sorry if you took it that way. Knowing that I am not the best with words, I had solicited the wording help of my coworkers to come up with the friendliest messages poss...

The Scout-arrival Study aims to collect the first sightings, transient or resident, of Purple Martins. We do not distinguish between residents and transient birds, the are all Purple Martin 'scouts' to us. Please complete the online scout form at your convenience. http://purplemartin.org/scoutreport...

The USFWS has a page titled Avian Influenza in Wild Birds?Sources of Information with many links to information on the subject. http://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/issues/AvianFlu/WBAvianFlu.htm Bird Life International also has a good FAQ page: http://www.birdlife.org/action/science/species/avian_flu/...

Here are two migration tracking sites I am aware of:

Ruby-throated Hummingbirds:
http://www.hummingbirds.net/map.html

Chimney Swifts:
http://www.concentric.net/%7edwa/page49.html

I apologize for the forum outage that occurred this weekend. I attempted to repair this from home yesterday but was unable to get anywhere. It ultimately took an intervention from our web hosting provider to resolve this situation. It was down a little over 22 hours. Our web hosting company is about...

John, when you click on the emails on a website, your browser will call whatever program is set on your computer as the default email program. Most MS Windows systems come with Outlook Express, but it could be any number of other programs. My guess would be that your default email program is crashin...