Beautiful new waterfront homes built along Tacoma shoreline — for beloved birds
This month Parks Tacoma staff put up some beautiful waterfront housing. But it’s not for us. It’s for a new purple martin colony to lure North America’s largest swallows back home to the Ruston waterfront.
In 2024, staff removed 1,200 pilings offshore from Tacoma’s Dickman Mill Park. Many of the purple martins made their home among the pilings, which anchored the Dickman sawmill from the 1890s to 1979. The pilings were coated in chemicals that are considered carcinogenic to people and aquatic life.
In February, Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium staff relocated 16 purple martin nest boxes to a berm south of Chinese Reconciliation Park, said Parks Tacoma spokesperson Stacia Glenn in an email Tuesday.
“Purple martins are native birds that migrate back to Washington and other areas of the West Coast, usually arriving from Brazil in early April and departing by late August,” Glenn said in a news release. “The birds, beloved for their pest control and throaty chirps known as the Dawn Song, are an important species that restore balance to the ecosystem.”
Conservationists estimate there are about 600 adult purple martins in Washington, and the city of Tacoma could house as much as 16% of the state’s population, according to Glenn. It’s unclear how many birds were displaced in 2024 when the Dickman Mill Park pilings were removed, but 34 adult birds had been counted there by community monitors, she said.
The main colonies of the birds can be seen at Titlow Beach, the Point Defiance Boathouse, Chambers Bay and hopefully soon south of Chinese Reconciliation Park, Glenn said.
Purple martins are listed as “a Species of Greatest Conservation Need” by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) due to their low population in the state and vulnerable nesting sites. The designation means human intervention is necessary for the birds to survive, Glenn said.
“The purple martins’ population started to decline in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s when forestry operations removed large amounts of timber that housed natural cavities traditionally used by the birds as nests,” per the press release. “Around the same time, non-native birds such as house sparrows and starlings were introduced to the area and competed with purple martins for resources and nesting habitat.”
Learn more about how to volunteer with local community monitoring programs online, as well as how to share your observation of purple martins with WDFW.
