Purple Martins

Male Purple Martin

When you put up a Purple Martin house, it is as if you installed a miniature neighborhood in your backyard! Dark, glossy blue males and brown females peek out of the entrances and chirp from the rooftops all summer.

Purple Martins are our largest swallows; they perform acrobatics as they snap up flying insects.

Purple Martins have very large, broad chests; stout, slightly hooked bills; short forked tails, and long, tapered wings.

Males are iridescent, dark blue-purple overall with brown-black wings and tail. Females and immature birds are duller, with various amounts of gray on the head and chest and a whitish tone on the lower body.

Purple Martins fly rapidly with a mix of flapping and gliding. They are year-round insectivores, feeding higher than other swallows, often higher than 150 feet and sometimes 500 feet or more off the ground. 


They feed in mid-air, during the day catching large insects such as dragonflies, beetles, flies, mosquitoes, damselflies, leafhoppers, grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies, moths, wasps, bees, caddisflies, spiders, cicadas, termites and mayflies. 

They also will eat bits of gravel to digest insect exoskeletons. They get their water while flying over ponds, scooping water with their bill.

Female Purple Martin

Purple Martins are colonial, with dozens nesting in the same spot in large, multi-roomed apartments or nest boxes. These houses often have six, 12 or 18 rooms high atop 15-foot poles.

To attract Purple Martins, place decoys on the top of the house and play CDs with their calls to give them the impression of a "good neighborhood."

Long-distance migrants, they gather in huge roosts (of several hundred thousand birds) along the Gulf coast from Texas to Florida. They fly during the day, foraging as they go, as they continue their migration to Brazil.

Purple Martins are arriving in our area in in early April. They stay through early September. If you don't see one in your backyard, look for them in open fields or near bodies of water.

Male in foraging in flight

Visit The Bird House to create your own Purple Martin neighborhood—house, retractable pole, decoy, CD and informational booklet.