Poor ladies martin rack. LOL

[DakotaLady]

I had my first year of what I call real success with martins. I had 4 pair nest, 3 adult pairs and 1 subadult pair. They raised 18 healthy youngsters. In addition to these nesting pairs I had many more birds flying around that did not find mates. I'm thinking that I will have a banner martin season next year if these and the ones that hung around all bring in mates. I'm so excited that it will be a long winter for me.

SO, with my ambitious thoughts of all these martins, I decided to make myself a gourd rack. I had an old wooden martin house that I built when we first moved out here with cheap particle board wood. It was in serious disrepair and no birds even looked at it. Thus I had a pole and winch system. I bought myself 8 metal fence posts and some long open ended rods that have threads on them so that I could secure them to the fence posts. I had to do a lot of serious thinking to pull it all together but I think my project was a huge success and now need to consider purchasing some more gourds. LOL

I will slowly purchase gourds each year adding a few so as not to burden myself with too much expense.

I'm attaching photos of my project. It looks like my rack is right beside my gardens and juniper trees...but it is actually about 75 to 90 feet away from my gardens.

[Barbara - DT]

Nice! That is a very clever rack! Wish I lived in your area, it's beautiful!

[~Ray~Gingerich]

Your martins will be very happy with that rack, lots of perching space too.