Finally, I got all my gourds and houses ready for the 2016 purple martin season! What a job pre-nesting hundreds of gourds and nest trays! When I get going with this project I usually make good progress.
For 2016 I made some minor changes to my purple martin colony and the number of cavities will remain the same as 2015. There are 404 cavities: 324 plastic gourds and 80 Trendsetter rooms. I have my five favorite gourd designs: Troyer Horizontal with tunnels/porches, Troyer Horizontal with cling plate, Troyer Vertical, Excluder and Super Gourd. There are five Trendsetter houses: three 12 room houses, one 16 roomer, and one 28 room system. My 17 gourd/housing systems are as follows: three Gemini racks, one 36 gourd Super System, one 24 gourd Super System, seven K24 racks, and the five Trendsetters. All cavities have round holes.
I did make some changes to my colony: the DL brake winches on all my gourd racks and two of my Trendsetters were replaced with Fulton brake winches. The Fulton winches appear to be smoother in operation when lowering systems. I was having problems with some of the DL winches when lowering systems: the racks/houses would jerk, slip and bounce. So I made the conversion to Fulton winches.
One of my older K24 type gourd rack systems with a 2 and half inch square aluminum poles has been replaced with a new Gemini system with a three inch square pole. All of the 24 gourds on the old rack have been transferred to the new Gemini.
I love my old Super Gourds, many of which are over 15 years old and are indestructible it seems. The plastic shows little wear and tear and these gourds will probably out live me! I did add outside/inside porches to all the Super Gourds that I am using this season. Though porches are not necessary for round hole gourds, porches are helpful to the parent martins when their babies are larger and cluster around the entrance. The porch better allows the parents to deliver large prey like dragonflies to the youngsters and helps minimize the dropping of insects. The parents can sit on the porch and more easily feed the babies whose heads are protruding out the entrance. Plus the inside porch helps hold nesting material together and even provides some protection from owls and hawks by reducing visibility directly into the nest and even blocking a predator’s access to the contents.
But for the most part my 2016 martin colony is similar to the 2015 one and I don’t plan on increasing the size. I attracted about 365 pairs of martins in 2015 and that is plenty! Plus my neighbor Bob has 232 cavities and between 150 and 200 pairs. So we have 500+ pairs of martins each season!
Here are some photos of my 2016 purple martin colony with everything at half-mast; all systems will be raised shortly. I still need to place my nest trays in the Trendsetters and add several net traps to some of the poles.
One section of my martin colony.
Another section of my martin colony.
And another section of my martin colony.
Steve
