Even if you’ve never heard of a purple martin, you’ve probably seen their houses—tall, steepled white birdhouses with many entrances or racks of dozens of gourd-shaped “condos.”
Up close, the birds are striking, with streamlined bodies and calls like laser guns. The adult males are a uniform, iridescent purple-black.
In the eastern United States, purple martins have become completely reliant on humans for housing. The western subspecies sometimes nests naturally in cacti, but the hollow trees eastern martins would historically rely on simply don’t exist anymore in numbers that could support them…