A Violet Horizon of Hope: Stewarding a Future for Purple Martins

By Jay Cooney

A Purple Martin perches on the platform of an artificial nesting cavity where researchers monitor the status of martin nests. Photo by the author.

As I crested a hill into the aspen-dotted meadows of the Pecos Wilderness, a flock of indigo-colored swallows filled the sky with rolling chirps. Seeing these Purple Martins felt like a brush with old friends, stirring memories from a summer spent monitoring nests with the Purple Martin Conservation Association. This organization mobilizes citizen scientists and stewards to monitor and care for this species across the eastern United States. The martins back east were a bird of local parks and backyards, a stark contrast to my encounter in the Pecos Wilderness. These different contexts reflect how wildlife can adapt to a human-altered world, if given the chance. Purple Martins provide one of the clearest examples of how human hands can have a positive, restorative influence on the landscape.

While often treated as eyesores, dead trees left standing serve as critical habitat for cavity-nesting birds like Purple Martins. In the Rocky Mountain West, Purple Martins seek out nesting opportunities in holes bored into dead aspens and firs by woodpeckers. Across their eastern range, including the southeastern corner of New Mexico, martin habitat is more closely associated with human presence. This relationship may be rooted in the practices of Choctaw and Chickasaw cultures who hung hollowed gourds to house Purple Martins and benefit from their consumption of crop-raiding insects. When settler societies clearcut eastern woodlands and introduced nonnative competitors like House Sparrows and European Starlings, martins’ affinity for human-supplied housing became a critical lifeline. Purple Martin populations east of the Rocky Mountains are now almost entirely dependent on artificial nesting cavities.

Purple Martins represent one of the most remarkable success stories of backyard conservation, with ‘Purple Martin landlords’ across the United States diligently monitoring their nests. These close observations of Purple Martin life history can scale to provide broader insights about global ecology. Purple Martins are aerial insectivores who consume insects on the wing and therefore serve as a sentinel species for the impact of harmful pesticides like neonicotinoids. Martins migrate to spend the winter in South America, especially on islands dotting the Amazon basin, highlighting the importance of conservation collaboration across arbitrary geopolitical boundaries. These migrations may also help us understand how climate change creates inconsistency between the spring arrival of birds and emergence of insects, an ecological mismatch that threatens aerial insectivores already in steep decline.

The mutualistic relationship between Purple Martins and people offers a template for a more hopeful, proactive vision of conservation. Purple Martin recovery in the East is supported by artificial nesting cavities. In the West where martins still nest naturally, low-intensity fires can increase the availability of dead trees, attesting to the importance of movements to revive cultural burning practices guided by time-tested Indigenous science. As environmental writer Emma Marris asserts in Wild Souls, our conservation practices need to mend the imagined human-nature divide. Purple Martins show us that, when guided by an ethic of reciprocity with our wild neighbors, we can leave a footprint of increased biodiversity. The reward for such stewardship will be nothing less than a sky that swirls with purple birds.

Jay Cooney is a Naturalist at Wild Birds Unlimited of Santa Fe