Purple martin houses will shortly be installed near the locks in Tenney Park thanks to a grant provided by the Tenney-Lapham Neighborhood Association Council and the City of Madison's People in the Parks Matching Grant Fund.

Bob Shaw and Jim Sturm are coordinating the project and have ordered twenty-four plastic gourds which will hang from two poles near the locks. The site should provide an ideal location for the purple martins which like access to water and large open areas.

Purple martins, the largest swallow in America, are neotropical migrants. They migrate north in the spring to breed in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In the fall, they depart for their winter homes in Brazil.

Purple martins, like all swallows, are aerial insectivores. They eat only flying insects, which they catch in flight. Their diet is diverse, including dragonflies, damselflies, flies, midges, mayflies, stinkbugs, leafhoppers, Japanese beetles, June bugs, butterflies, moths, grasshoppers, cicadas, bees, wasps, flying ants, and ballooning spiders.

Martins are not, however, prodigious consumers of mosquitoes as is so often claimed. Purple martins and freshwater mosquitoes rarely ever cross paths. Martins are daytime feeders, and feed high in the sky; mosquitoes, on the other hand, stay low in damp places during daylight hours, or only come out at night.

Purple martins use the trees near Burr Jones field just south of Tenney Park (where the railroad tracks cross the Yahara River) as a late summer roost in preparation for the fall migration. In August they descend upon the trees at dusk by the thousands.

Volunteers are needed to monitor the gourds. If you would like to get involved, please call Jim at 255-6931 or Bob at 255-3486.

-Bob Shaw