Skip to main content

Purple Martin Party Time!


Travis Audubon hosted a Purple Martin Colony visit this past Saturday next to the historic home of Laura Joseph.  Laura started the colony 25 years ago, the product of a lifelong love of the little birds.  The colony is tended, and carefully documented with daily data, by a group of dedicated volunteers called "landlords".  Steve, the "head honcho" of this effort, was in attendance to answer our questions and give us a peek at these interesting birds.


In February, the birds begin to arrive.  The mating pairs will produce around 500 babies by mid-May,  teach them to fly in the safety of the colony, then guide them to the larger migrating flock that draws thousands of sightseers each night to see them roost near Highland Mall.




Here in the colony, the landlords will first provide pine straw for nesting material.  Then the houses are lowered daily so that every single nest can be cleaned, eggs and birds counted, and houses carefully tended to ensure that the hundreds of Purple Martins who visit the colony each year have the best possible chance at a good life during their time in Austin.










Laura not only allows us to descend on her garden next door and the colony, we were also graciously treated to tables full of sandwiches, cooling raspberry lemonade and water, and delightful Purple Martin cookies made by Moonlight Bakery.  On a personal note, I have to say glazed sugar cookies often miss the boat.  They taste underbaked, and the royal icing can be dry and flavorless.  These were PERFECT!  Delicately browned crisp cookies with just the right amount of playful purple icing.  It was impossible to stop with just one, and several flew home with me.

All material © 2018 by Vicki Blachman for Playin' Outside. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Comments

What a fun event. Loved the Purple Martin cookies
Rock rose said…
That's quite a job. So the birds are not bothered by this, I guess.
Lisa Wagner said…
How great to have purple martins! I’ve always enjoyed them, but never had them close (aside from the garden where I used to work and the University golf course nearby).
Lisa Wagner said…
Purple martins are great to have -- those cookies look nice, too!
Kris Peterson said…
I remember seeing those interesting bird houses in a couple of locations during the Fling (like the Tanglewild stop). I'm glad to hear that they're well used!
Hoover Boo said…
Quite fascinating. I saw nesting boxes as in your photo at one of the Fling gardens. That the nests can be inspected and cleaned daily by humans without is a surprise.

Lovely that people are helping the birds to a healthy start in life. And those cookies are great!

Popular posts from this blog

Ho-hum to Habitat: My Path to Native Bees - Resources

San Antonio's Festival of Flowers will resume this Saturday, June 3, 2023, after a break of three years.    I've been given the opportunity to share how I garden, as well as a general overview of our native bees.   A link to a Google doc containing my handout (the info dense slides from my presentation) follows this list of resources.  Note that if you didn't attend, some of the handout pages may not make complete sense.     Hyperlinks to more resources: https://www.wildbeestexas.com/ https://w3.biosci.utexas.edu/jha/research/native-bee-communities https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?collection=TX_central https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/BeginnerBeeFieldGuide_11March2022_LowRez.pdf https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/wildlife_diversity/nongame/native-pollinators/bumblebee-id.phtml https://www.pollinatorphotos.com/ https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/       https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yOIlJFjzgAlhc5nfTXkqrVutPxWHLwfQ/vie

A Plant with Purple Leaves

There are a couple of groups on Facebook where I lurk and occasionally dip my opinion into the fray.  They're places where people with knowledge of unbelievable scope can be observed, deftly identifying this obscure native plant or that scraggly left-behind orphan found in the backyard of a newly purchased home.   One such backyard orphan recently was posted in need of identification.   If it were a native plant, two people on "Texas Flora" would've named it within minutes.  Even the taxonomy of those impossible grasses is typically put to rest in seconds.  Not so with this poor guy.   At first I was fairly certain it was one of the purple leafed basils, maybe 'African Blue'.  It's fairly impossible to find it still thriving in a Texas January, but two plants in my yard are still hanging in there.  They even look like they'll come back if we don't have a deep freeze before spring.  BTW, this basil has one heck of a botanical monik

Ho-hum to Habitat

  For lack of a better way to reach everyone in person and online who attended my presentation to Williamson County Master Gardeners on 08 May 2023, I'm posting a handout here.  These are only the slides that were particularly info dense, so forgive the lack of context if you weren't an attendee.  Note that the list in the handout is only suggested for Travis and Williamson Counties - the Wildflower Center will have suggestions tailored to your specific location, and NOT just in Texas! These are live links to some of the items shown:  The Wildflower Center , The Jha Bee Lab , NPSOT's plant lists by Texas region , NPSOT Wilco ,  and finally, Lynne & Jim Weber (their books are available at your local bookstore & on Amazon.) T here's a world of other resources, too!  Check out Sam Drogge's incredible photography at the USGS Bee Inventory , follow Heather Holm on Facebook and read her books, follow Carol Clark on her blog "Carol's World" .  Seri