EasternPurpleMartin_EggWorms_Chambers_Louise_CorpusChristiTX_9August2022_Reel4123.mp3

Louise Chambers [00:00:00] I remember the first few landlords to, to kind of fine-tune a procedure for feeding their martins and how they promoted it.

Louise Chambers [00:00:11] The first that I remember was a landlord in Indiana, and it was cold weather, and it was going to continue cold, too cold for flying insects - maybe in the low forties or something like that. And it was going to continue for more than three or four days, which four or five days is the cutoff point where adult martins will starve to death with no food.

Louise Chambers [00:00:33] And his martins were sitting, huddled out on a perch. It was sunny but cold. And he just said to himself, "My Martins aren't going to die." And he went off to a pet store or a feed store, and he bought a few hundred mealworms, and he got out his slingshot and he turned those mealworms into flying insects. He kept shooting mealworms, past the martins, not at the martins, but past them. And he could see that they were following these little things, flying through the air. And eventually one of the martins sallied out, grabbed a mealworm, went back to the perch. It ate the mealworm.

Louise Chambers [00:01:09] Well, he kept it up, and pretty soon all of his martins were darting out and grabbing the mealworms he slingshotted it up for them. And he saved his martins. He kept feeding them that way until the weather broke.

Louise Chambers [00:01:22] And, you know, you wouldn't feed them all day long. He might feed them two or three times a day.

Louise Chambers [00:01:28] It kept them alive.

Louise Chambers [00:01:30] And so that was an innovation. We all hated killing weather, it was going to kill the adults or kill the babies, but nobody had a way to overcome it until now.

Louise Chambers [00:01:42] And then another landlord - this, this man was in Illinois. He was very inventive. And he trained his martins to come to a little pan full of insects that he put up on a stepladder near the housing. And he would ring a bell pail every time he put the insects out there and they learned to associate the bell with feeding.

Louise Chambers [00:02:02] And so when he had bad weather, they would get fed. He kept feeding them through good weather because he wanted them to remember about it. So when they had lots of babies and were needing more food, he would daily put out some worms and he also (mealworms) and he also started offering them little bits of scrambled egg, which is pure protein. And eggs turn into birds, so that was a good food choice, too.

Louise Chambers [00:02:26] And those two stories just kind of spread and people started trying it in their own backyards. And then one spring, the PMCA, it was late May and we had a freeze. We had a lot of martins back and there was no food. We got some mealworms, we got those slingshots out, and we went down to the martin houses and started slingshotting up there. And eventually, yeah, they caught on and they learned how to eat the mealworms.

Louise Chambers [00:02:57] We even put up a special tray feeder that went up and down a pole with a rope like a flagpole, and we could put mealworms on all of those trays and we'd load them up. And the martins, they watch each other, and one, one does something, pretty soon the others are trying it. They were all coming and just scarfing down mealworms - the only food available.

Louise Chambers [00:03:17] And we ran out of mealworms, and it was a weekend. We couldn't get any more shipped to us by FedEx. We couldn't get any at the local pet store. So we said, "Well, we'll try the scrambled egg." And we started scrambling eggs in the office microwave and cutting them up into little worm-size shaped pieces.

Louise Chambers [00:03:35] And the martins weren't touching them. They were sitting on the shingled roof, the back of the office roof, because it was a little warmer there. The shingles were dark and absorbed some sunlight.

Louise Chambers [00:03:47] So we started tossing handfuls of the little egg worms up there, around the martins. And as one of those little pieces rolled down the roof, maybe it looked alive, like a mealworm, and a martin dived on it and ate it. And pretty soon they were all gorging on scrambled eggs. We couldn't scramble them fast enough.

Louise Chambers [00:04:06] One martin saw another martin wearing a yellow leg band and tried to eat the leg band.

Louise Chambers [00:04:11] I was carrying out a big tray full of egg pieces and a desperate bird just skidded through the eggs on my tray. It was going to get there first and get fed.

Louise Chambers [00:04:19] They knew they were on the verge of starvation, and so they overcame their normal fear of people to get their eggs.

Louise Chambers [00:04:26] And we got them through the bad week in that way.

Louise Chambers [00:04:29] And it's not an ideal food long-term, especially for babies. It will turn their poop very liquid after a few days.

Louise Chambers [00:04:37] But in an emergency we were mighty glad that we knew to try the eggs. And we also now all keep big, big bags of mealworms and crickets in our freezers, for emergencies.