Tree Swallows and Purple Martins
As the boating season softens into its quiet close, I offer this small chronicle of the winged lives that share our beautiful club – our bird population.
First came the tree swallows, arriving with the early April light. They claimed the thirty-odd boxes scattered along the docks and beyond, each nest a living pocket holding three to six soft-bodied young. Some pairs, restless with the season’s abundance, raised a second brood—an extra turning of the wheel.
The purple martins tell a different story. They returned on the sixteenth of April, as they always have, yet in diminished numbers. Only six pairs nested among us, and from those nests rose twenty-three fledglings. Last year we banded sixty-four; in our brightest season nearly four hundred, from eighty-three pairs. After more than thirty years the colony falters, and I fear this may be its final summer—the long song thinning into silence.
Why Is This Happening?
Why do the songbirds dwindle? Perhaps it is only nature’s own breathing, the rise and fall of cycles older than our docks. Or perhaps it is the weight of our own hands: the quiet poison of pesticides, the hard faces of rising towers, the spinning blades of windmills, the patient hunger of house cats. The causes blur, as causes often do.
I hold one small comfort close: thirty years ago this colony began with only two pairs, a fragile beginning that somehow became a long and generous run. Perhaps it will happen again.
Ospreys
One last note, tinged with loss. The osprey platform, in its fourth year, stood empty. No great wings claimed it. Then a storm broke the mast in two. I will raise it again before the next spring, and wait once more for the sky to answer.
Submitted by Peter Huszcz
For background information, see our page on the purple martins. This is one of NSC’s Environmental Initiatives.
To read more on purple martins in general, please see the Wikipedia page.