Length -- 7 to 8 inches. Two or three inches smaller than the
robin.
Male -- Rich glossy black with bluish and purple reflections;
duller black on wings and tail. Wings rather longer than the
tail, which is forked.
Female -- More brownish and mottled; grayish below.
Range -- Peculiar to America. Penetrates from Arctic Circle to
South America.
Migrations -- Late April. Early September. Summer resident.
In old-fashioned gardens, set on a pole over which honeysuckle and roses
climbed from a bed where China pinks, phlox, sweet Williams, and hollyhocks
crowded each other below, martin boxes used always to be seen with a pair of
these large, beautiful swallows circling overhead. Bur now, alas! the boxes,
where set up at all, are quickly monopolized by the English sparrow, a bird
that the martin, courageous as a kingbird in attacking crows and hawks,
tolerates as a neighbor only when it must.
Bradford Torrey tells of seeing quantities of long-necked squashes dangling
from poles about the negro cabins all through the South. One day he asked an
old colored man what these squashes were for.
"Why, deh is martins' boxes," said Uncle Remus. "No danger of hawks carryin'
off de chickens so long as de martins am around."
The Indians, too, have always had a special liking for this bird. They often
lined a hollowed-out gourd with bits of bark and fastened it in the crotch of
their tent poles to invite its friendship. The Mohegan Indians have called it
"the bird that never rests"--a name better suited to the tireless barn
swallow, Dr. Abbott thinks.
Wasps, beetles, and all manner of injurious garden insects constitute its diet
-- another reason for its universal popularity. It is simple enough to
distinguish the martins from the other swallows by their larger size and
iridescent dark coat, not to mention their song, which is very soft and sweet,
like musical laughter, rippling up through the throat.