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When Kelly Baker arrived for work at the Sun Building downtown Wednesday morning, he saw something he’d never seen before — hundreds of dead and dying birds.
“We saw dozens and dozens of dead birds on the ground, in the parking lots, in the streets — live birds in the streets being run over by cars on Detroit (Avenue). It was just an absolute mess,” said Baker, property manager of the building.
The birds, purple martins, have been roosting in downtown Tulsa since the 1980s, but this year was the first time they decided to gather en masse at the Sun Building, at 10th Street and Detroit Avenue.
While the birds migrate through Tulsa every year on their trek to spend the summer in Brazil, they are particularly susceptible to bad weather — particularly heavy rain and thunderstorms.
Dick Sherry, a local purple martin expert and Tulsa Audubon Society member, said Wednesday morning’s thunderstorms likely accounted for the birds’ mass demise.
Of the more than 200,000 purple martins that had taken up residence in the trees outside the Sun Building, more than 500 died in Wednesday’s early storms.
During heavy rain, the birds can become so saturated with water that they fall out of the trees in which they’re roosting, Sherry said.
When Baker noticed the birds Wednesday morning, he notified Sherry, who went to the building to determine their cause of death.
Sherry said that while some speculated the birds had been poisoned, he is certain their deaths were weather-related.
Professors from the University of Tulsa and Tulsa Community College collected specimens for further study, Sherry said.
Traveling to downtown Tulsa
While the birds have been coming to Tulsa for decades, Sherry isn’t sure how they pick their roosting spots.
“That’s what we can’t figure out,’’ There’s no rhyme or reason to why they seem to pick a spot,” he said.
Last year, the bulk of the birds began the summer near the DoubleTree Hotel Downtown at 616 W. Seventh St. before moving to a spot near 11th Street and Houston Avenue, and ended the summer near 10th Street and Boulder Avenue, Sherry said.
This summer, the birds have pretty much stayed in one spot: in the area surrounding the Sun Building.
Although Sherry doesn’t know for sure, he thinks the Bradford pear trees in the area make it an ideal spot for purple martin roosting, but there’s no way to know for sure.
A sight to see
Baker, who has worked at the Sun Building for 25 years, said he’s never seen the martins there before.
Now his building is the prime location for watching the birds roost at night, when they come in a giant spiral of black specks, swooping into the trees surrounding the building.
Sherry said watching the purple martins fly in is a “spectacle,” which he likens to being inside a snow globe and watching the particles fall down all around you.
“The sky is just totally full of martins,” he said.
The martins likely come from Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa and even as far away as Minnesota and maybe Canada, but they won’t be in Tulsa much longer. They are typically around only from July until September before flying south for the winter.
Courtesy of tulsaworld.com
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