A quick lesson on how to prepare food for and then feed purple martins. During extended periods of bad weather, supplemental feeding can greatly improve purple martin survival rates .
We feed scrambled eggs, meal worms and crushed egg shells. We have a tray on a pedestal and the martins have learned to go to the tray for food. They learned from a Robbin. We had the offering on the tray and the Martins only looked at it. Then a Robbin landed and started to gorge on the meal worms. The Martins watched this Robbin activity with great interest. After a couple of hours the first Martin landed on the tray and tried some offering. This activity continued and increased and eventually all Martins in the colony learned to eat food from the tray. We limit the supplemental feeding to just during inclement weather because we don't want the Martins to become totally dependent on human feeding programs.
Great recipe ideas, we have Martins living along beach cliffs, around 160 of them and I will make them some scrambled egg squares. Love the Cricket flicking, lol... We go feed the seagulls and throw pieces of food up into the air and surprising how much of it does not land.
Thank you so much for this! I'm new to the care of purple martins and we've had a bit of a cold snap... I'm a little worried about them as they seem very sluggish today. I don't have any money to buy crickets right now, but apparently scrambled eggs will do the trick! Thank you!!
So a martin is a large swallow, but isn't a fat cricket also a large swallow for the largest swallow? It could even be the largest swallow for the largest swallow...
I trained my martins using crickets then switched to mealworms. I've also used scrambled eggs. I buy mealworms by thousand and am able to toss them easier than crickets.
Mealworms chew will bite their crops, ok to give a few ...but if feeding too many, the crop will end up like a seive & the bird's health will be compromised, even to the degree that it will be too painful to actually eat
Is it necessary to feed them? I have a home orchard with about 80-100 fruit trees and I have lots of problems with insects like beetles, butterflies, dragon flies, etc. I am setting up one of these houses along with another set of houses for the eastern bluebird in my home orchard so that they will control the insect populations for me in the summer and I don't have to use pesticides. It's nice that I can help ensure the survival of the species but what I really need is help controlling the insect populations in my garden/home orchard. So feeding them seems counterproductive at best.
