a 
PURPLE MARTIN. ‘ 339 
communities around the dwellings of man, where their social, familiar, and confiding 
disposition make them general favorites. There they find abundance of insect food, and 
repay their benefactors by the destruction of numerous injurious and noxious kinds, and 
there, too, they are also comparatively safe from their own enemies. These conveniences 
vary from the elegant Martin-houses that adorn private grounds in our Eastern cities, 
to the ruder gourds and calabashes which are said to be frequently placed near the 
humbler cabins of the southern negroes. In Washington the columns of the public 
buildings, and the eaves and sheltered portions of the piazzas, afford a convenient 
protection to large numbers around the Patent Office and the Post Office buildings” 
(Brewer). In Wisconsin I had, in the days of my boyhood, each season colonies of 
Martins in my Martin-houses, and later I attracted them to my garden in Texas and 
Missouri by placing boxes and miniature houses on high posts among ornamental 
shrubbery and vines. In Houston, Texas, they breed in large numbers under the roofs 
over the side-walks, even in the business part of the city. I have frequently observed 
them in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida nesting in gourds in close proximity to the 
primitive negro cabins. The small garden of my friend, Mr. H. Baumgertner, situated 
in a densely populated part of Milwaukee, harbors not only a pair of Bluebirds, House 
Wrens, Hairbirds, and Robins, but a few pairs of Martins breed also in the boxes 
provided for them. In order to protect these beautiful native birds from the attacks of 
the ever present House Sparrows, Mr. Baumgertner kills from four to five hundred of 
these feathered anarchists annually. A pair of Tree Swallows also breed in the neighbor- 
_ hood. The last named species is said to drive away the more familiar, beautiful and 
interesting Purple Martins, though IJ am unable to speak from my own experience. In 
the vicinity of Boston, where the Martin was once very common, its places are now 
taken by the Tree Swallows, who occupy almost exclusively the Martin-houses, very 
rarely breeding at present in hollow trees. 
In a very interesting article (““On some of the Causes affecting the Decrease of 
Birds.”’ Bull. Nutt. Club, VI, p. 193), Mr. H. W. Henshaw writes on the extermination 
of the Martins, near Boston, as follows: ‘‘Of the local effeéts of a storm, however, the 
best example I know of is the case of the extermination of the Purple Martins in Cam- 
bridge and near vicinity years ago during a cold storm which caught the birds a day 
or two after their arrival from the South. This instance is of peculiar interest, inasmuch 
as the Mattins, although affected only within a small area and remaining abundant 
outside of it, have never reoccupied the lost ground; whether from a failure to increase 
sufficiently to colonize it, or from inability to make headway against the Tree Swallows 
and Wrens, usurpers of their ancestral seats, is uncertain.”’ 
In the North the Martins raise only one brood, while in the Gulf region two 
broods are raised annually. 
On the feeding of the young, Mr. Otto Widmann says: “As a rule, the older the 
birds in the nest, the oftener they are fed, and from the size of the inseéts which the 
parents bring, the age of the young may be judged. The youngest birds are fed at 
longer intervals with crushed insects, mostly small beetles, from the craw. About a 
fortnight old, they are fed from the bill with soft insects of the size of large flies; but 
insects with stings, such as bees and wasps, are never brought. When four weeks old, 
