Purple Martin was an obscure street in Barnegat where there were martin houses behind the real houses. Every year since, I've gone down that street and found Purple Martins, until this year when the martin houses seemed to be gone--perhaps the property changed hands.
I didn't panic. But after not intersecting with them at the Cranberry Bogs yesterday, or Double Trouble today, I started thinking about where I might find martin boxes nearby--I didn't feel like a schlep to Brig just get this year bird. I don't go to Jakes Branch CP very often--it's about a mile away from Double Trouble and there's usually nothing there that I won't see other places, but I was fairly certain they had a martin house next to the little pond. (Jakes Branch is an interesting place to go for reasons other than birds. It has a great nature center with a high viewing platform that gives you an expansive view of the Pine Barrens. You can see all the way to the Lakehurst base where the Hindenberg exploded. Many of the trails are ghost streets, originally carved out of the woods when a newspaper in New York, over 100 years ago, was giving away building plots as a sales promotion--nothing ever got built. Then, in 2002, a devastating wildfire leapt over the Parkway and destroyed much of the area, so naturally it was turned into soccer and baseball fields.)
The martin houses were right where I imagined them to be, and a few martins were sitting outside on the perches. Put it on the list.
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