NASHVILLE — At first they circle high in the evening sky. But as night descends, they, too, begin to descend, bird by bird, one at a time, and then all in a rush: 150,000 purple martins swirling together, each bird calling to the others in the failing light as they sweep past the tops of buildings in the heart of downtown Nashville. To anyone watching from the ground, they look like one great airborne beast, one unmistakable, singular mind.
Their music grows louder and louder as the circles tighten and the birds swing lower and lower, settling in the branches of sidewalk trees, or swerving to take off again as new waves of birds dip down. They circle the building and return. They lift off, circle, reverse, settle, lift off again. Again and again and again, until finally it is dark. Their chittering voices fall silent. Their rustling wings fall still.
It is not like Hitchcock: Watching these birds is nothing at all like watching crows and sea gulls and sparrows attack the characters in “The Birds,” Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film. The purple martins that have been gathering here the past few weeks are merely doing what purple martins always do this time of year: flocking together to fatten up on insects before making the long flight to South America, where they will spend the winter.
That’s not to say the birds aren’t causing problems. The place where they have chosen to roost this time is Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, which was already having a terrible year. With all scheduled programming canceled or postponed by the pandemic and so much of the symphony budget based on ticket sales, the organization had no choice but to furlough all the musicians and most of the staff and hope for better days. What the Nashville Symphony got instead was a plaza full of bird droppings and elm trees so burdened by the weight of 150,000 birds alighting in them night after night that whole limbs are now bent and hanging limp.
The folks at the Schermerhorn at first assumed the birds roosting in their trees were starlings. Downtown Nashville is home to a large number of European starlings that live here year-round, and they have been a nuisance in years past. It’s easy to mistake a flock of purple martins for a flock of starlings, especially when actual starlings join the martin flock from time to time.
Starlings are an invasive species, introduced during the early 1890s by Shakespeare enthusiasts determined to bring to the United States every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare. All 200 million starlings now living in North America are descended from a few dozen birds unwisely released into Central Park during the late 19th century. Thanks to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, it is against the law to kill native songbirds. It is perfectly legal to kill starlings.
The transcendently beautiful Schermerhorn is built of limestone, which is highly porous. “The sheer amount of bird poop was causing a massive amount of damage,” my old friend Jonathan Marx, the interim chief operating officer of the Nashville Symphony, said when I called him to ask about the purple martins. “But we never had any intention of killing the birds. We just wanted them to move on.” The plan was to disperse them by fogging the trees with grapeseed oil.
Purple martins have been roosting in the Nashville area for years — at least since 1996, according to Melinda Welton, the conservation policy co-chair of the Tennessee Ornithological Society — though always before in much smaller numbers. Among birders, word quickly got around that the purple martins had settled in at the Schermerhorn this year, and in far, far greater numbers than ever before. “It’s a pretty remarkable roost — definitely one of the larger ones in the country,” Joe Siegrist, the president and chief executive of the Purple Martin Conservation Association, said on the phone last week.
Which is why Kim Bailey, Kim Matthews, John Noel, Anne Paine, Ms. Welton and Mary Glynn Williamson went into action as soon as Mr. Noel noticed a pest control truck on the symphony plaza. It was, as Mr. Marx put it, “a collision of people who are taking care of their property with people who are staring in awe and wonder at the birds.”
Purple martins are already in trouble from virtually every angle imaginable. Climate change has intensified hurricane season, making the fall migration even more perilous. Deforestation has destroyed the birds’ natural nesting sites, and aggressive nonnative species like starlings and house sparrows have claimed most of those that remain. Like other swallows, purple martins are insectivores, but pesticides have made food scarce. One reason the birds chose Nashville as their migration staging ground may be its proximity to the insect-rich Cumberland River.
That night, while Ms. Bailey, who works as a staff naturalist at the Warner Parks Nature Center, explained to the exterminators that purple martins are a federally protected species, others in the group starting calling and texting and messaging everyone they could think of who might be able to help: News Channel 5, the mayor’s office, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, and local conservation nonprofits like the Tennessee Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy in Tennessee, and the Nashville Wildlife Conservation Center.
Those folks reached others, who in turn contacted others still. With phones ringing and emails flying and social media on fire, the exterminators hastily decamped. The group stayed put, Ms. Bailey told me in an email, until they received assurances from a T.W.R.A. officer that he had contacted the pest control company and the truck would not be returning that night.
And now, like a flock of purple martins, this story veers in an unexpected direction. A tale of conflict becomes instead the story of human beings who listened to one another and then came up with a plan that benefits everyone involved, and the birds most of all.
Mr. Marx heard from a number of conservation groups that evening and others the following day. Each time he explained that the symphony staff had no idea they were hosting purple martins and, now that they knew the truth, would never harm or harass the birds. But he also pointed out that the flock had already caused significant property damage: The cost of power-washing the front of the building alone is at least $10,000, and that’s not even addressing the rest of the building or the damage to the trees.
“As soon as we heard that, we started trying to think of ways in which we could work together,” Terry Cook, the state director for the Nature Conservancy in Tennessee, told me. “One, we wanted to mitigate the current impact of the roost, but, two, we wanted to think about long-term opportunities to either make the site less preferable to purple martins in future years or to embrace this as a unique Nashville event.”
Within hours, the Tennessee Wildlife Federation and the Nature Conservancy in Tennessee had joined forces to start a fund-raising campaign to help with cleanup costs. “In the conservation community, we felt like we needed to rally around this problem so the symphony wouldn’t have to carry this burden alone,” said the Tennessee Wildlife Federation’s Kendall McCarter, who hosts a nesting colony of purple martins in his own yard every year. “Especially right now, when they’re in a very difficult place because of Covid.”
The initial campaign to pay for power washing the Schermerhorn’s facade was fully funded within hours, but the appeal is ongoing, and any extra money it raises will be used to treat damage to the trees, to replace trees that can’t be saved, and to help with costs that arise during future purple martin migrations. Because the birds, which seem to prefer well-lighted roosts, will most likely be back.
In one way of looking at it, this rescue operation mimics the long relationship between human beings and purple martins themselves: Even as we are responsible for the birds’ troubles, we are also responsible for their survival. The population east of the Rocky Mountains, where 98 percent of all purple martins live, “is completely reliant on people putting up bird houses for them to reproduce in,” said Mr. Siegrist. “If people didn’t do that, the bird would go extinct in the majority of its range. Each one of those birds putting on that spectacular display in downtown Nashville exists because people cared enough to put up a bird house. Each one of those birds came from somebody’s backyard.”
“We’re so thankful to have community partners who are willing to help us deal with this completely unexpected situation,” said Mr. Marx, “because we need to be putting our focus on the fund-raising that’s going to allow us to bring our musicians back to work. This is a time when so many people are under so many forms of duress, but one thing we know is that music is one of those things that brings people together.”
Until then, this collaboration between naturalists and the symphony is, for everyone involved, a happy ending at a time when people are desperate for happy endings. “I’m so excited about how it’s been handled there in Nashville,” Mr. Siegrist said. “I think it can be a blueprint for other communities.”
I find myself dreaming of a time when the musicians of the Nashville Symphony are back in that beautiful space, perhaps even playing a sunset concert, the doors of the Schermerhorn thrown wide to the music of purple martins swooping down from the sky. What a glorious sound that would be, after this year of silence and fear. What a gift to gather together and hear that music — the music our own species makes and the music of the birds. Both at once.
You can donate to the campaign to pay for purple-martin cleanup at this Tennessee Wildlife Foundation website, and support the Nashville Symphony, here.
Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”
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