Purple Martin Forum

Whew, too many species. I guess I'm free to give them any name: tasty suicidal mystery moths.

The martin on page 3 has a couple brown moths in her beak. My martins this summer were catching a lot of these moths. Does anyone know what species of moth, or why they fly in daytime instead of at night?

Good idea, Ed. I'll use the discarded nests to mulch nearby small trees. A blowfly specialist would be very interesting.

The link was interesting but I'm with Emil on this and will stay with Sevin (in very tiny amounts) although I worry that I may be killing the jewel wasps that are supposed to parasitise the blowfly larvae.

Last spring I was blowing in a lot of cellulose insulation, thereby breathing a lot of boric acid. So I looked it up on the internet and was surprised to find nothing about adverse health effects, for humans anyway. Then this summer at one of my martin talks I was asked if boric acid would be better...

I have five poles at public sites and use padlocks in holes drilled in the cable spools of the winches. This works fine but sometimes damage is caused by kids goofing around at night when they stand on the winch handle. This causes so much pressure on the cable it can wedge in the pulley at the top ...

Ask your local utility workers how they backfill the base of poles. Around here they use pea stone, not concrete.

John Miller is right - a strong colony can repel most sparrows. But a few get through. Here's how I've learned to deal with them. I wait until the sparrow has completed her clutch and is incubating. Then I install a glue trap. I cut the trap in half lengthwise and form it into a tube with the sticky...

Thank you to all who responded. Especially Matt, who sent me to my stack of Update back issues and the detailed article that got me going. I now have a prototype, using a simple flat plate for the bottom of the crescent and a bit of cutting to make the top of the crescent. Quick, cheap and little cu...

Thank you to Bill and Emil. A heavy tunnel would cause tilt, plus I'm not eager to do major sawing. These gourds are not mine. They belong to a widow lady and were a gift from her son. I've wondered about a short tunnel attached to the gourd with screws, or maybe having the access cap modified to al...

I have a dozen supergourds and starlings have been a problem. I'd like to change to SREH with little or no cutting of the gourds. Any ideas on how to do this?

Thank you for the ideas. This sure beats trying to come up with a solution from scratch. Everything is set at Chautauqua for another great season.

A widow in town has a 12 gourd rack that had 100% martin occupancy last year. This year the starlings are a problem. She doesn't want to fool with the trap, and shooting takes too much of my time. Given the high population of starlings, SREH is the way to go. I do not see any easy way to change her ...

The hole is one and three eights inch. A trip wire inside is connected to a trap door outside. It's my own design, I wish I could send a photo. It might be possible to adapt a Spare-O-Door, or at least copy the design.

I have three t-14s. On each one I converted one attic to a special sparrow apartment. Works well. The hardest part was removing the triangular gable end. A T-14 is well built and not designed to come apart.