03-14-03

 

I have a nickname I wear with pride, “Cricket Lips”.

 “Do crickets even have lips?” you might be wondering… no, my lips don’t look like a cricket’s… I got the name because I put live crickets in my blowgun.

 

Why on earth would a nice lady like you use a cricket as a weapon?  Well, I am not really using them as weapons, it just helps them to fly. 

 

Do crickets want to fly?  Did you get Peter Pan mixed up with Pinocchio?  Um, no.  I don’t think crickets like to fly at all, they really would prefer to crawl under a rotten log, into a dark little hole…(which by the way, makes it really easy to load them little buggers into the tiny end of the  blow gun… it’s not like a spit ball you know- I don’t put the cricket in my mouth!), and I try not to think about Jiminy when I am blasting crickets up into the sky at 30 MPH… but as far as a dramatic final moment- it probably beats getting eaten by an Iguana.

 

Sometimes I am desperate for some flying insects because  my martins would be starving in the cold.  They are aerial insectivores, they only eat flying insects, when it’s cold- the bugs don’t fly, the martins can starve in just a few days, they might be too weak to even fly, they just fall to the ground and die.  Those earliest arrivals, they are the most experienced older birds, they are the foundation of your colony.  Losing just a few of them, that is a terrible loss for the overall reproductive rate of the colony.    My blowgun is the tool of choice to make a cricket into a flying insect.  Some people use a plastic spoon.  Slingshots tend to make a mess of the bug.   When I see my martins sitting out in the cold with their wings drooped down, I just go get my blowgun and they perk right up to see me.  I shoot the crickets up in a gentle arc and the martins dive off their perch and catch them in midair.  It’s amazing to watch, and it’s fun.  After a while my mouth does get a little tired, but each bird only needs about eight good sized crickets to be satisfied.  It’s only the earliest arrivals who usually get caught in a weather situation that would starve them out, so now that I know the emergency feeding technique, I look forward to those early arrivals without worry.

 

One of the most rewarding moments for me as a purple martin landlord happened last year.  I was not positive the bird at my colony was “one of mine”… he could have been passing through on his way to a home further north, but there was a cold spell and when I went out with my blowgun -  he skillfully caught the very first cricket I shot up to him- I knew he knew the routine.  What a thrill to think that a full year had passed since the last time this bird and I had played catch, and in that time he had returned to Brazil and home to me again.  To think he had carried a memory of me that whole time, what a wonderful moment of connection.

 

You can buy crickets from a bait shop or a pet store.  If you need a lot you might want to buy them direct from Fluker Farm in bulk or the PMCA.  That will save you a lot of money, they will ship overnight, so if you see a bad forecast ahead, you can usually get your crickets before the weather hits.  It’s not just cold, a string of rainy days can also starve out the birds, this is very tragic if they already have live young they are trying to feed.

 

 Purple martins don’t usually renest, so if they lose a nest of eggs or live babies, that is a substantial loss for the colony.  Last year we had a weather crisis here right as the birds were finishing their clutches of eggs.  Instead of being able to start setting, the females were having to spend a lot of the day hunting for food.  The eggs went bad.  It took some of them a while to catch on that the eggs were bad, then they pushed them out of the bowl and started over.  Some of the clutches were good and did hatch.  The season was really delayed.  The babies fledged a few weeks later than they usually do.  I made out a lot better than my friend to the north and south did, the southern landlords in Georgia and Tennessee lost a lot of the young, and it was too late for the birds to renest, up to the north the Landlords in Michigan and Canada, they lost a lot of their returning adult birds, the bulk of their breeding pairs.  It will take a long time for the remaining birds to build that population back.

 

Purple martins have been coping with natural disasters like this for thousands of years.  If you are a Darwinist you might see this as a simple matter of the process of natural selection.  Maybe we should just let these birds starve to death, after all, maybe if those early birds died out, we could teach the species a long term lesson and they would stay down south till it was safe to head north.  By interfering with natural selection, aren’t we actually encouraging these birds to return earlier and earlier until they are a bunch of human dependant house pets?  Well, not exactly, the fluke of weather patterns has nothing to do with the fitness of the species, if a week has alternating days of rain everything would be ok, but if three days of rain happen in a row am I supposed to believe half the birds were unfit to live?  The problem is, because of the introduction of the European Starling and the English House Sparrow, Purple Martins have lost their ability to rebound quickly from natural weather disasters. There are nest site competitors who spell devastation to vulnerable martin colonies.  Working to prevent weather related deaths is one of the small ways that human beings can help to offset the harm that was done to the swallows when the house  sparrow and starling  were brought to this country.

 

For information on migration “Journey North” has some valuable information about many kinds of birds.  http://www.learner.org/jnorth/current.html

 

The purple Martin Conservation Association has a scout arrival map tracking the progress of the Purple Martins, and you will see that the map shows the timing of the adult and the sub-adult birds. http://www.purplemartin.org/scoutreport/2003/scout.html

If you have had martins nest at your home before, they will arrive on the early schedule, if you are trying to attract martins for the first time, you will be working to entice the birds from the second stage of the migration, and that would put you four to six weeks behind your neighbors with established colonies. Last week the red winged blackbirds came back.  Usually the tree swallows get her before the martins and I have not seen them yet.   I usually expect my birds on March 15, but I think they may be a bit late because it has been so cold.  Hopefully by next week I can tell you of the arrivals and the weather will be in their favor.