THE PURPLE MARTIN 
By WILLIAM DUTCHER 
The National Association of Audubon Societies 
Educational Leaflet No. 13 
The Purple Martin and its Pacific Coast relative, the Western Martin, 
do not need a detailed description. The adult male is a lustrous blue- 
MARTINS NESTING IN GOURDS 
Photographed by Francis Harper 
MARTINS NESTING IN HOUSE 
Manufactured by J. Warner Jacobs 
black, slightly duller on wings and tail. The adult female and the young 
of both sexes are grayish brown, glossed with steel-blue on the upper 
parts, but the under surface is dark gray, lightening into whitish on 
the belly. The Martin is about seven and one-half inches in length, 
but the great spread of its wings, from fifteen to sixteen inches, makes 
the bird look very much larger than it really is. 
During summer the Martin has a very wide distribution in tem- 
perate 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 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 
