JOY ALONG THE WAY: WHERE HAVE THE MARTINS GONE?

It seems that I'm doomed to go purple martinless this year. My heart leaped up when I saw a lone scout huddled on the martin house porch one cold April morning but he never returned with an entourage. They stopped for only a few days last year, not bothering to raise a family.

I spend much time staring at that empty house and wondering what happened. It could be a tree limb has protruded into their territory. More plausible, though, is the fact that a telephone and cable TV wire going to my neighbor's house were re-routed, far away from the martin house. Those martins! They do love wires close to their houses.

I've been accumulating some dried gourds which I get at the Farmer's Market. Martins like gourd houses too. Maybe it is the less elite of them which don't give a fig about porches and nearby wires. But how am I ever going to get these gourds up next to some wires? Tie them onto the telephone, cable or electric wires leading to my house? I think not. I do still have an old television antenna atop my house, but getting the gourds up there would also pose a problem. Hang them on my clothesline wire? Too low. Martins are picky about that.

I don't even hear the martins' chortling from a neighbor's home a little way up the hill. Maybe there's something in the air around here. Twenty-two years of martins and then a sudden stop. There is not even such a bird song or chortling on my singing clock.

To have some substitute thing to watch, though there are no substitutes for martins, I could hang a gourd home somewhere on by big latticed garden seat and see if a wren would occupy it. This would cause only more befuddlement in the wren population. You see, the first pair of wrens to come go around to all the wren houses (I've got a lot) and push in a few twigs to establish some sort of squatters rights. Finally they make up their minds to choose one for their first summer family. The wrens that come afterwards go around to all the houses and have the good manners to move on as they assume some of their feathered cousins are building there. Unless I go out and pick those false nest-building twigs out, the later in-coming wrens just move on and out.

There are all kinds of ways of marking territory. Even humans mark their territory by fences, hedges or rows of flowers. Robert Frost in his poem "Mending Wall" quoted a neighbor who said, "Good fences make good neighbors." Frost confesses, in the poem, that he would like to question the neighbor about that since there was no wandering livestock to keep out. Was he walling something in or something out? The neighbor could never get beyond quoting his father's saying, "Good fences make good neighbors."

The Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China didn't make good neighbors. Thank goodness one of them is gone, the other just a tourist attraction.

I don't think the wrens will ever stop their habit of twig-marking more territory than they need. Neither will I stop pulling out their false twigs of nest-building when I've found they have really chosen a home.