The Lone Star aluminum houses are high quality products and I am having great success with them at my new martin colony site in northwest Louisiana. Martins readily colonized these houses and do well in them.
I use the Alamo house which is basically an aluminum T-14 with minor structural differences. It has 14 compartments which are 6? x 12? in size and can be fitted with nest trays. You can also purchase perching rods which are attached to the porches.
I also have the Goliad, which is my favorite, and this house has 12 compartments of the same size as the Alamo. You can add more floors to the Goliad to create more compartments. Perching rods can be purchased and attached to the porches and you can use nest trays. Though the Goliad has separate porches, the compartments are contiguous and this can increase male martin domination behavior. On my Goliad, I installed porch dividers which helped to keep male martins ?out of each others? feathers? though the dividers did not stop all nest domination behavior. I will be adding at least one more floor to my Goliad next season to create a 16 room house with four tiers. I may even create a 20 room Goliad.
Though the Lone Star houses are high quality and I like them a lot, I have some ?issues? with them. The houses don?t fit snuggly on the poles and wobble when being raised and lowered. This may cause significant noise when the house either scraps or bangs against the side of the pole. My Goliad makes horrendous noise at times and I hated lowering and raising it during the nesting season! I am going to try to re-fit this house on the pole for next season. The Alamo also wobbles and hits against the pole during windy weather and sometimes this causes the martins to flush out. The square hole in the middle of the houses where the pole slides in is larger (maybe too much?) than the pole diameter and there are no slide buttons to keep the house stabilized against the pole. (My PMCA Deluxe gourd systems have such plastic buttons and they not only keep the rack stabilized on the square pole, but greatly reduce the noise factor.)
Also, when raising both houses using the Lone Star winch system, sometimes the houses will not fit snuggly against the top roof section. You will see a small gap/space between the upper roof and the house top and you can?t turn the winch handle any farther. You may have to raise the houses over and over again until the winch finally locks in place so that the houses are flush against the roof. If the houses are not snug against the top roof section, then they may wobble in the wind and create noise each they time hit against the pole.
On the photos of the Alamo, you will see some duct tape attached to the portion of the house that presses up against the roof top pole section. I had tried as an interim measure to create a ?cushion? that would fit more snuggly against the top roof. This worked for a while. What I need to do is take the pole down and re-position the top roof section so that it will fit more securely against the house. However, my duct tape measure did not stop the house from wobbling and hitting against the pole during windy weather.
For next season, I will try to modify both Lone Star houses to hopefully mitigate the ?wobbling? and ?noise? issues. If others have experienced similar problems with Lone Star houses and resolved them, I would appreciate any suggestions! Thanks.
Steve
