Austin has bats, Tulsa has Puple Martins!

[PonderInc]

If you've never seen a hundred thousand (or more?) purple martins flying in to roost, now's your chance.  Downtown Tulsa has been a significant roosting site for the martins since the early 1980's.  There are so many birds, they're visable on dopplar radar!

The martins take off during the day to feed throughout Green Country (often traveling as far as 20-30 miles each way), but return to the downtown trees at night to roost.  They roost together in the downtown trees during several weeks, mainly in July and August, before migrating to Brazil for the winter.  This year, their roost is near the convention center, and visable from the Doubletree parking garage rooftop.

It seems they especially like Bradford Pear trees, and open spaces (like, you know, surface parking lots) b/c this offers protection from preditors.

For years, I noticed all the birds and assumed they were starlings.  A friend of mine, who's a purple martin "landlord" (he has martin houses in his backyard, and watches over several mating pairs and their babies who return to his yard each year), taught me that I was wrong.

Starlings flap their wings a lot, while martins soar in like stealth bombers...very cool and beautiful.  A few starlings do roost in the same area as the purple martins, but the purple martins far outnumber the starlings.  It's illegal to disrupt the roosts b/c Purple Martins are native migratory birds, and are protected by law.

Here's a video of the downtown roost...though it doesn't quite convey how amazing it is to see trees in which there are as many birds as leaves.  http://www.tulsaworld.com/webextra/default.aspx

And here's the article from todays Tulsa World

[carltonplace]

These guys normally fill up the trees on my street this time of year, but its not really a treat. Man they make a mess, and are really loud. My dad was a purple martin enthusiast, I'm not.