‘Mother of Purple Martins’ Restores Cape’s Bird Population

Purple Martin (Mary Keleher)

Every morning from April to August, Mary Keleher puts her hair up in a ponytail and heads out to a Mashpee golf course, where she uses a rope-and-pulley system to lower white plastic gourds from trees. Inside each gourd is a nesting pair of birds.

“They are a little antsy today. They fly off, they circle around, fly past the gourds a few times, and they come back and land,” Keleher said.

Keleher first got involved with Purple Martins in 2007, when she discovered a half-dozen pairs breeding in an old, beaten-up bird house.

Since then, she’s almost single-handedly grown the local population of Purple Martins from those original six pairs to 96 pairs. Across different sites, these pairs hatched more than 200 chicks last year, nearly all of which left the nest safely.

“She’s really sort of the mother of Purple Martins on Cape Cod,” said Mark Faherty, wildlife biologist at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary and host of WCAI’s Weekly Bird Report. “Now there’s just hundreds of these things throughout the Upper Cape.”

Purple Martins lived all across southern New England throughout the 1800s, but a severe cold and wet spell in 1903 decimated the population, and they all but disappeared from Cape Cod.

Now, when Faherty thinks of modern Purple Martins, a few things come to mind.

“Just gorgeous, gorgeous birds,” he said, adding, “They’re incredible flyers. They’re really powerful, strong flyers.”

Read the rest of this story at WCAI’s website.