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Jun 7, 2004
Two hatchlings from the first nest fledged today. We have 16 eggs and 182 hatchlings remaining for a total of 200. The sparrow nest and scissortail nest have both been destroyed - the sparrow nest by a cat (this is a guess) and the scissortail nest by the wind. The killdeer eggs are gone so they must have hatched. The mockingbird was sitting on her nest this evening.
May 30, 2004
As of today we have 68 eggs and 133 hatchlings. The eggs in the nest cam room are due to hatch this Wednesday. So far we've removed 9 eggs that didn't hatch and currently have 3 more eligible to remove. We've had 100% occupancy for quite some time, and as of May 28th, all 38 cavities have had eggs. We are actually over capacity - there are two or three young males sleeping on the porches at night. Here is a list of the other nests in the yard: Mockingbird (4 eggs), American sparrow (1 egg), Killdeer (4 eggs), scissortail (?) and kingbird (?). I'm not able to check the scissortail or kingbird nests. We had an assortment of nests last year, but only the killdeer's survived our Oklahoma wind storms. Hopefully, this year they will be more successful.
Apr 29, 2004
We've added one more SuperGourd. This is it - we don't have any more to put up. Our cavity total is now up to 38. Currently we have 34 nests, 2 cavities with purple martins who have yet to get the nesting urge and 2 empty gourds. We started the official nest checks on Apr 14th. As of today we have 17 eggs. The nest cam was moved from MH-1 to MH-5. I don't know what the deal is with the birds in room #1 - they aren't in any rush to start nest building. I've updated the nest check spreadsheet.
Mar 31, 2004
Added information about Purple Martins - Nest Checks.
Mar 30, 2004
Conducted an unofficial nest check. We could tell where there had been some nest building activity, but it is still too soon to determine which cavities are in use. One male PM stayed in his compartment the entire nest check. That was a new experience for us. We've given up trying to count how many PM's we might have. The most we counted were 41.
Mar 19, 2004
All purple martin cams are back on line: Web Cams. We've also added two more SuperGourds. Cavity total is now at 37.
Feb 10, 2004
The Purple Martins are on their way and we are rushing around trying to get everything ready. We aren't planning many changes for the 2004 season: We will be adding 8 additional rooms this year for a total of 35 cavities. This will include 2 new SuperGourds. Harold has made a couple of updates to the website: Martin House Pole and Hazer Construction documentation. We also have Photo Album - Martin Nest Cam (2003) pictures posted.
Aug 30, 2003
The Purple Martins all left by the end of July. I would say we had a successful season. In total we had 23 nests, 130 eggs, 107 hatched and 102 fledged. We have been happy with our new setup - heavy duty poles and the T-14. We have a few changes to make before next season. I think we will build two more T-14 4-room apartments which will bring us up to 33 cavities. We have bought 2 new SuperGourds to replace the cheap gourds we used this year. We took a lot of pictures over the summer. Hopefully we will get those added to the web
site soon.
August 11, 2003
Our new web server is finally online. New hardware includes an AMD Athlon processor, motherboard, and redundant hard drives in a RAID array. The Operating system was upgraded to Red Hat 8.0 Linux running Apache 2.0 web server. We've also upgraded our Internet connection for improved upload
speeds.
May 23, 2003
We are well into the 2003 Purple Martin season. This year we have a new built-from-scratch
14-room cedar martin house (the T-14) and two new extra heavy duty birdhouse poles. In
total we have enough rooms for 27 pairs of martins. As of today (Friday, May 23rd) we have 52 eggs and 38 hatchlings. It seems the majority of the eggs came due just as the weather turned cold again. We've lost a couple of the hatchlings due to the cold weather and/or limited insect supply. Harold fed the newborns scrambled eggs on the worst day, so our losses could have been much worse. Be sure to check the web cam link. You can view the two martin babies that were born May 20th in the nest. We also have outside views of both martin houses.
May 5, 2003
On May 5th the eggs in the Nest Cam house #5 were attacked by a male English Sparrow while both of the martins were out feeding. The last of their 5 eggs were laid earlier that morning. Two of the eggs were destroyed, a third had a hole in the shell and had to be discarded. Read about it at Purple Martins - Sparrow Attacks Nest Cam
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