The Purple Martin 



By WILLIAM DUTCHER 



President National Association of Audubon Societies 



THE Purple Martin and its Pacific coast relative, Progne subis hesperia, 

 are too well known to need a detailed description. The adult male 

 is a lustrous blue -black, the wings and tail being slightly duller. 

 The adult female and the young of both sexes are grayish brown, glossed 

 with steel-blue on upper parts, while beneath they are dark gray, shading 

 into whitish on the belly. The size of the Martin is about seven and one- 

 half inches in length, but the great spread of wings, from fifteen to sixteen 

 inches, makes the bird look very much larger than it really is. 



During summer the Martin is a bird of very wide distribution in tem- 

 p'erate North America ; in autumn it migrates to the tropics, where it 

 spends the winter. There are eight species of this genus of the Swallow 

 family, all of them being confined to America. Before the white man dis- 

 covered and settled the western world, generations of Martins had made 

 their annual journeys from their tropical winter homes to the temperate 

 parts of both continents. Their nesting sites were then in hollow trees or in 

 caves. While forests and rocky retreats have not been entirely abandoned 

 by the Martins, yet many of them now breed in homes provided for them 

 by man. The red man, a true lover of nature, invited the cheerful Martins 

 to remain about his tepee by erecting a pole on which he hung a hollow 

 gourd, for a nesting place. The white successor of the aborigine has 

 adopted his red brother's bird friend, often providing a far more elaborate 

 home for its use. 



Is there anything in the bird world that represents home life and com- 

 munity of interests as well as a colony of Martins ? Contentment, happiness, 

 prosperity are here, and the cheerful, social twitter of the Martins and their 

 industrious habits are a continual sermon from the air to their brothers of 

 the earth. The only note of discord in one of these happy colony houses is 

 from the pugnacious English Sparrow, who covets the comfortable homes 

 of the Martins and tries to evict the rightful owners and substitute his harsh, 

 disagreeable chatter for their pleasant voices. 



The value of the Martin to the human race is very great. The birds 

 are so preeminently aerial that their food necessarily consists of flying in- 

 sects. Among these may be some of the dreaded Stegomyia. It is a well- 

 established fact that this and other species of mosquito convey both 

 malarial and yellow fever. Every mosquito, therefore, that is destroyed by a 

 Martin, or, in fact, by any bird, lessens so much the chance of the spread 

 of fever plagues. Human lives are sacrificed every year; immense sums of 

 money are expended for investigation and prevention of yellow fever, yet in 

 some localities where this scourge is found the Martin is not understood and 



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