Jim Wilson, Recreation & Conservation Specialist, Northampton County Parks in July- September 2024 Newsletter of The Lehigh Valley Audubon Society
There were no Purple Martins nesting at Minsi Lake before 2020.
Purple Martin project at Minsi Lake
Since Northampton County Parks Martin Habitat Partnership initiative with LVAS was begun in 2020 with Mike McCartney, Scott Burnett, and Tim Kita, the success of this species at Minsi Lake has been phenomenal. Thanks to LVAS volunteers, a large and growing Purple Martin colony can now be seen at Minsi.
Over the past five years, five 18-unit condo towers have been installed. Occupancy this nesting season in those condos (36 of which are new this season) is over 90% with nesting pairs in 80 of the 90 condo units. At Minsi Lake, it really is a build it and they will come situation. The lake provides an ideal habitat for these birds of greatest conservation need—a shallow, warm water lake teeming with dragonflies and other food sources.
There is lakeside space at Minsi for eight more 18-unit Purple Martin nesting towers.
Northampton County Parks and Recreation will fund three more towers at the Lake for next year’s nesting season, and Friends of Minsi Lake will have funding for the remaining five towers.
The expanded Purple Martin project at Minsi Lake means more volunteers will be needed to maintain and monitor the nesting condos over time. The Northampton County Parks and Recreation and LVAS partnership now manages 108 condos in six nesting towers—five at Minsi Lake Park and one at Louise Moore Park. Next year, they’ll be tasked with 144 units, which the small team of dedicated volunteers have agreed to do. If the Purple Martins indicate there’s continued need for nesting cavities at Minsi, up to five more towers will be provided the following year—for a total of 13 Purple Martin condo towers and 234 units to maintain and monitor from March through September.
Maintenance involves removing the PVC nesting gourds from their towers after each season, hosing them out and storing them at a nearby Parks and Rec facility. The gourds are then brought back to the lake in late winter. Pine straw is placed in each condo and the condos are attached to the towers in numeric order for recording nesting data in each unit throughout the spring and summer.
Monitoring during the nesting season requires one or two volunteers to visually check each of the 18 condos hanging from the towers by lowering and raising the racks. Observations are then recorded on a datasheet that is eventually shared with several national databases to track Purple Martins and the community and citizen conservation science needed to sustain them here in the East.
After hatching, only federally licensed bird banders can physically handle and weigh, measure and band the Purple Martin chicks when they are several weeks old. Volunteers are still needed to shuttle chicks in baskets back and forth from their nests to the banding station set up next to the towers.
Northampton County Parks and Recreation needs LVAS continued support to help with installation labor, monitoring, maintenance, winter storage, and, of course, all the banding and data collection done each nesting season. If anyone is interested in volunteering their time to this project in 2025 and subsequent years, please send an email to James Wilson, Recreation & Conservation Specialist for Northampton County Parks, at jwilson@norcop.gov.