WING ENTRAPMENT IN THG CLAIMS 3 MARTINS!

[Kenneth Hicks]

I was doing a walk-around inspection yesterday evening and noticed a male was trapped at the entrance of a Troyer horizontal gourd with the tunneled conley entrance. I immediately lowered the housing and found him to be already dead. Upon looking inside the gourd, I found another male and a female that were also dead. Obviously with the trapped bird these two also became trapped. They probably had not been dead over 24 hours.

I had not been around the last 4 days to keep an eye on things. I feel like I would have found them if I had been around and could have prevented this from resulting in all three of them dying.

My father put things back in perspective for me. I called him and related this same story to him and he said that the death of three martins would have wiped out his entire colony plus one.

I mainly want to give everyone another heads up about wing entrapment since it has been mentioned a few times in the recent past.

Kenneth

[KathyF]

Hi Kenneth,
Did you happen to remove the inner lip from your gourds? It may be something you'll want to consider. Here is a link to the discussion:

http://www.purplemartin.org/forum/viewt ... ht=#130771