I have sad news about my Martin eggs or babies. After not seeing the mom and pop Martins for two days when the rain came, we checked the Martin house yesterday and discovered an empty nest.
As reported earlier, the housing the Martin pair wanted to nest in was an aluminum Martin house that had been converted from 12 compartments to 6 compartments measuring 6" X 12" deep.
Since the wind last winter had bent the double steel pole when it was down, we were not going to put the housing up due to it being very hard to work with a bent pole.
However, since the Martin pair seemed determined to take that housing, we finally managed to get it 3/4 the way up. They started nesting immediately and, the last time we looked in the housing, they had four eggs.
We don't know why they wanted this housing instead of the several gourds complete with pine needles and mud on a really nice and easy to manage pole. ???
We don't know what happened to the eggs or babies. (I figured it was time for the eggs to have hatched.) Since the nest was about 8" in the back of the compartment, we don't see how an animal, hawk or owl could have reached them.
The nest was undisturbed and we could find no eggs or babies on the ground under the pole or anything else that looked suspicious.
I was always a little concerned about the pair being away from the colony and by themselves but a few of the other colony Martins would visit the pair almost daily.
As you can imagine, we are sorry this happened after waiting four years to get Martins and, as we have been enjoying our pair for several weeks now, we were looking forward to seeing the babies.
On a positive note, some of the other colony Martins are still coming over and flying all around the gourd rack so, hopefully, they will return to nest here next season.
Sad PM News
Hey Dottie,
Sorry to hear about the missing eggs/babies. That sure does sound like the work of a snake. In and out, leaving no clues.
It seems that a combination of a predator guard and bird netting seem necessary to keep snakes at bay.
Unless you use a truly snake-proof method, like Emil, and get some help from our good friend electricity.
Sorry to hear about the missing eggs/babies. That sure does sound like the work of a snake. In and out, leaving no clues.
It seems that a combination of a predator guard and bird netting seem necessary to keep snakes at bay.
Unless you use a truly snake-proof method, like Emil, and get some help from our good friend electricity.
