Community
Purple martin majesty on display at the Gig Harbor BoatShop
Ever want a close-up glimpse of the private lives of a couple of love birds doing what comes naturally?
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Here’s your chance, courtesy of the Gig Harbor BoatShop on Harborview. Stop into its street-level store and you can watch them do it, live and in living color on a computer monitor.
At this time of year, it’s a family-friendly show unofficially rated FTW (fun to watch). It features a devoted mom and pop darting in and out to feed and otherwise care for their now barely week-old progeny — at least four tiny balls of clumsy, gray-blue fluff attached to generously oversized, yellow-tinged mouths.
Purple martin chicks demand a meal in this image taken from a Gig Harbor BoatShop video.
Baby (bird) cam
A group of birding enthusiasts among the BoatShop’s volunteers has installed a tiny camera to invade the boudoir of a productive pair of purple martins. Those are the small, swift and songful birds you are apt to see and hear along the Gig Harbor shoreline.
This pair occupies one of several purple martin birdhouses on the BoatShop’s dock. Walk out to the open-to-the-public dock and you won’t have much problem figuring out which one it is. It’s the only one in the neighborhood with an antenna on top and an electrical cable running to it.
Like the others, this tech-equipped box has one very small entryway. It’s just big enough to allow mama and papa to squeeze in and out with the tangle of sticks, grasses and leaves of their nest, not to mention their nourishing loads of insects to feed the kids.
The wired bird house on the BoatShop dock. Photo by Chapin Day
Those sturdy, usually wooden, birdhouses, plus others on private and public docks around the harbor, are the product of a decade-long BoatHouse and birder-led campaign to provide breeding season homes to sustain local populations of the migrating purple martins — largest of North America’s swallow family.
Purple Martin Project
Project members John McMillan and John Voigt told Gig Harbor Now that many of the potential seasonal homes, formerly provided naturally by protective nest site holes in such things as rotting pilings and shoreside trees, are gone now. The boxes are meant as replacements.
Like our town’s beloved tourists, the birds usually hit town in April and stick around until late summer before flitting off to warmer climes who knows where.
John McMilan adjust the monitor display at the Gig Harbor BoatShop. Photo by Chapin Day
The BoatShop birders say they hope to aid efforts to find an answer to the where question by arranging to have some of their visitors banded and electronically chipped as part of a larger study to trace the martin travels.
They also say they are exploring putting the martin-cam feed on the BoatShop’s website to enable round-the-clock viewing.
The mama martin in her nest.
Until than, the only way to get the inside-the-nest story is to visit the non-profit’s fundraising store during business hours, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.
Click here for more information about the BoatShop’s Purple Martin Project.