We live south east Texas, near Lake Houston. We moved into a newly developed subdivision about 4yrs ago, prior to that it was all densely wooded, no place for martins within a mile or so. When we first moved in, I put up an 8 compartment “Nature House”, on a pole about 14ft high. This was given to us by my mother in-law, the pole was broke, hence, only 14ft. Well, at the time I knew jack squat about attracting martins. So that first spring in our home, I put the martin house up in the back corner of our yard, and about 10ft from a tree-line of tall oaks and pines. (big mistake) Well, the trees were cut back quite a bit from the new construction, and we did have a lot of martins swoop in and check out the house, but none stayed. In fact, no bird would nest in it, not even sparrows, (which I also was clueless about).
Fast forward to the spring 2005. No martin would go near the house, but we never saw many, as the neighborhood was still only about a year old. At this point, I was only mildly interested in getting martins to move into the house, so I did nothing….
Fast forward spring 2006. A carbon copy of 2005. Nada. (my own fault)
Spring 2007… This was when things (me) started to change around our place. My wife and I started noticing a lot, and I mean a LOT of martins flying, swooping and doing their thing, but mostly they stayed a little ways down the street from our house. Now my interest was in martins was really getting peaked…. With all those martins, why didn’t we have any in our house? Well, I did a little research on the net, and realized I was a Texas sized buffoon with my attempts at attracting martins. There was WAYYY more to this than just throwin up a birdhouse and watchin em move in. I promptly moved our house in January 07 about halfway between the back of our house, and the tree-line, this being the most open area we had to offer. The more I read about martins not liking trees close by, and not liking to be too close to a human home, my hopes began to dwindle… Well, 07 came and went, and we didn’t get boo in the house. Plenty of visitors, all summer long, but no martins wanted to be that close to the trees, it seemed. Oh well… not much I could do about it.
Spring 08. (this is where it gets good…) It was middle of Jan. and we started seeing the martins arriving. They were all still hanging out down the street, but by middle of Feb. they were back in force. Everywhere you looked, there were martins…. Except our little house. Well, I decided I was going to find out where all these martins were staying, it must be close by. And sure enough it was. A neighbor about 4 houses down had a thriving colony of at least 14 pairs. And oh my gosh, his house looked like the slums. The pole was only about 12-13 feet high, (he said it got blown down during a winter storm) and was leaning about 10 degrees from vertical, propped between a privacy fence and a storage shed. It was a 14 compartment S&K martin house, with SREH holes. Well, it was only getting toward the end of Febuary, so I had an idea. I went to the local Lowes hardware store, and bought the same exact house. I put it up about 5 feet from out little 8 compartment house, (toward the human house). Now we had TWO houses up, one just like the populated house down the street. After all, if they like that style house, maybe a couple would move into ours?
Well, 6 weeks roll slowly by while we are constantly teased by martins visiting the two houses, but mostly the S&K. Knowing the window of opertunity was slipping away, I purchased two martin decoys, and the dawn song CD. We put up the decoys, and play the CD all the time, morning/noon/night. Well, one Sunday morning my wife and I are sitting the yard drinking our morning coffee, and watching an ASY male and his female tease us, in and out of the house. (we had been watching this pair for about 2 weeks, but each night they would leave, I think back to the neighbors slum house). So, here we are enjoying the martin tease dance, and hoping against hopes, this pair would eventually stay, after all, these were ASY adult martins, the male being totally black, they would not likely switch nesting sites. When POW! Out of nowhere a, RED TAILED HAWK, (I think) shoots up out of the next yard and NAILS one of our purple martin.................DECOYS! Then tears off after the adult male! We are sitting about 20 ft away, looking at each other like “what the heck just happened!??” I look up, and the perch the decoy is on is all bent to heck, with the martins gone in terror. GREAT! We finally get an interested pair, and a stupid hawk try’s to eat them. Yea……. They’ll be back to our wonderful site. Why couldn’t the hawk go for the darn house sparrow that keeps coming around?
Would the pair come back? Did we have a snowballs chance….
You’ll have to find out tomorrow when I can finish the story, sorry got to go!
Below is an aerial photo of our location I got on live maps.
Cheers,
Michael
I got emotionally involved and want to know the ending now!!!! 
Get used to it! 
It was funny actually, watching them toss the marbles out, they would get hold of the tape on the marbles with their beaks, and would give em a good fling out the hole. It was about this time my wife called me at work, sounding like she was in a blind panic, THE MARTINS! Grass, house, sticks.. outside! Woa, Woa, woa… calm down dear! What happened? 
