Purple Martins stage for massive migration

I stood in the parking lot and looked up to see tens of thousands of Purple Martins swarm through the evening sky with a singular destination… two Sycamore trees! By the time the sun had set, literally tens of thousands of these birds had navigated through continuous clouds of birds to settle into two trees. It was the most massive influx of birds I’ve ever seen! The picture I posted doesn’t do justice to the number of birds. But I’ll work on some other pictures and see if I got anything better.

The Purple Martins are staging, preparing for their migration to Brazil and during this preparation time develop huge roosts. One of the local birders and martin enthusiast had studied radar images (yes the bird swarms are so large that they show up on weather radar images!) and tracked the birds yesterday to a roost at the Oklahoma Allergy & Asthma Clinic near 13th & Lincoln. She said last night’s roost included 100,000 – 300,000 birds! Tonight’s probably came close to 70,000 – 80,000 an indication that the birds are already migrating.

The Purple Martin watch party turned out to be a lot of fun! I got to see several birders I hadn’t seen this summer, met a few new ones, and we were also joined by staff from the Allergy Clinic (who were quite proud that these wonderful birds had chosen their trees) as well as a crew from Channel 4. And special thanks to my sister Ginny who spread the word through the Allergy Clinic about their special nighttime visitors — the massive amount of droppings on the sidewalk under the trees was a definite sign that birds had been there, they just didn’t know the scale of the bird invasion!

Work projects have been wonderful but very time consuming this week. I hope to find a little more time to chase birds this weekend and report back on any new or interesting findings.

All the best,

Pat