Purple Martins

3 Crabs Colony

June 22, 2025

This year the first Purple Martin returned to 3 Crabs on April 17th.

First Purple Martin to arrive. 4/17/2025

Others arrived over the next several weeks. After their 8,000-mile flight from the east coast of southern Brazil they spent a good month feeding, resting, and negotiating for ownership of the various nest boxes. (For a fascinating documentary on the migration route of our Western subspecies of Purple Martin, watch this short video, On the Wings of Roxa.) Given the very cool spring, they didn't start actively working on their nests until the end of May.

Working on her nest. 5/30/2025

The boys help collect nesting material too. 6/2/2025

Need some wet stuff for the berm. 6/3/2025

Still working on it. 6/9/2025

Since dragonflies are the preferred food for feeding their young, the PUMA have to time laying eggs so that when they hatch 15-18 days later there will be an abundance of dragonflies. The last few years have been so cool that there have been few dragonflies and the parents have had to catch smaller insects, and make more feeding runs. Hopefully we'll get some warmer weather really soon.

Favorite food. 8/4/2024

My friend Sally took the following award-winning photo of a fledgling being fed last year. It clearly demonstrates the challenge for the parents when there are few dragonflies to catch. One pair of adults finally abandoned their late-season clutch of five chicks before they fledged.

Dropped some! Purple Martin by Sally M. Harris. 8/14/2024

We monitored their nest building and when we observed prolonged periods when adults stayed in the nest boxes we scheduled our first nest box check for today. We will check the boxes two more times in July.

History

Efforts to establish a Purple Martin (PUMA) colony at 3 Crabs Estuary in Dungeness, WA began in the mid-1990s. Volunteers from the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society (OPAS) constructed four simple nest boxes and hung them on old pilings that they accessed by boat. By 2005 PUMA were returning regularly and OPAS began adding more boxes. Instead of using a boat at high tide, volunteers monitored the nests at minus tides when they could walk out on the tide flats and raise and lower the boxes with a 10' pole.

Purple Martin nest boxes at 3 Crabs, 5/16/2010

For more information on the history of the OPAS Purple Martin project, see: Purple Martin Nest Box Study,

There are also some excellent blog posts about the PUMA outings here: OPAS Blog,

I joined the other volunteers in 2009 and have helped build, maintain, and monitor the nest boxes ever since. Every fall, after the Purple Martins head south, we bring in the nest boxes to clean, repair, and store until spring. The goal is to put the boxes back up shortly before the PUMA return in early to mid-April. The challenge is that we have to do this task when we have a daylight minus tide. The PUMA do not read our tide charts so sometimes they arrive while we are putting up the boxes, and sometimes we put the boxes up a week or two before they arrive.

Newly retired, young and fit, I took over the task of lowering the nest boxes on a 10' pole, so we could hang them on a nail at eye level. Then we would remove the door, insert a mirror, and take a picture of the reflection of the nest in the mirror.

Checking a Purple Martin nest box at 3 Crabs Beach, 6/22/2009

Finally we replaced the door, raised the nest box on the pole and hung it up again. This was somewhat challenging on a calm day and very challenging on a windy day. After a wind gust nearly caused me to drop a box containing eggs I proposed screwing a board to the feet of an extension ladder so it wouldn't sink in the mud, and inspecting the boxes from the ladder. This created new challenges but over the years we have modified nest boxes, the ladder, and the method of taking photos. Here is what that process looked like:

Checking a Purple Martin nest box at 3 Crabs Beach, 7/12/2018 (by Sally Harris)

In 2018, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, North Olympic Salmon Coalition, and about 28 other organizations completed a major project to restore the Dungeness Estuary at 3 Crabs. This effort included removing the 3 Crabs Restaurant and an old bridge over Meadowbrook Creek, rerouting the road and constructing a new bridge, and removing several hundred old creosote-covered pilings left over from the Dungeness Wharf. Yes, including the pilings that we hung the Purple Martin boxes on. To understand the scope of this project, watch the excellent 8-minute documentary produced by local cinematographer John Gussman, titled 3 Crabs, 5 Salmon, 30 Partners.

You may also enjoy my 4-minute video of the piling removal, which happened from October 12-17, 2018. NOTE: this is a 65MB file so it may take a minute to load before it starts playing. For those of you who are fact-checking me, be aware that the Purple Martins you hear singing in this video were half-way to Brazil, having left town in early September. Chalk this up to poetic license on my part.;)

Fortunately, OPAS negotiations resulted in three new steel pilings placed where we specified on the tide flats where we had been hanging the boxes on about ten pilings. If you watched the above video of the piling removal, you will see that they installed the three steel pilings before beginning to remove the old pilings. In 2012 we began experimenting with a new box design, using 6" PVC pipe mounted on a 1x6" backboard and then attached to piling.

New PVC nest box design at 3 Crabs, 6/21/2012

The Purple Martins seemed happy with this design and we slowly started replacing old wood boxes with these new, lighter boxes. In June 2018, with permission from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, we mounted two duplex nest boxes in the tidal lagoon adjacent to the parking lot at 3 Crabs.

New nest box installation at 3 Crabs, 6/26/2018

Since we now only had three pilings, we spent the fall and winter designing and building six Purple Martin triplexes using the 6" PVC pipe. Here is a photo of the new boxes ready to install. What looks like a nose is a handle for pushing the door in or pulling it out. A small nail on each side secures the door. The hole near the top on the right side of the handles is an access hole for inserting an endoscope camera to photograph the nest. So we no longer have to remove the door, which is safer for the birds and for the person on the ladder.

New triplexes ready for installation, 3/17/2019

We also added a stand-off to the ladder. The photo below shows Alex inserting the endoscope into Box 5A while looking at the image on his cell phone. When he gets the image focused on the nest with the showing the box number on the back of the box he presses a button on his screen to take the photo. Len is on the ground holding the ladder steady while our fearless leader, Ken, views the endoscope image on his tablet. We can now photograph all 18 nests in under 20 minutes, vastly reducing the annoyance factor for the birds. At this first check of the season, most of the boxes had fresh nesting material, but no eggs.

Checking a Purple Martin nest box at 3 Crabs Beach, 6/22/2024