And, to top off the day, I decided to investigate the purple martin situation once again. Pema had called me at work on Thursday saying he was pretty sure he saw one flying out of one of our new martin houses. Given all the cautions we'd received on the difficulty of attracting them, I was skeptical. Probably a starling or sparrow...so wanted to see if I could find out for sure. Yesterday we did take down the house, and verified a nest was present, and the birds we saw looked swallow like (in contrast to either sparrows or starlings) but here's the final confirmation!