By Daniel Patrick Sheehan | dsheehan@mcall.com | The Morning Call
A hawk or an eagle had been circling overhead earlier, so Tom Fiorini wasn’t sure the purple martins would be hanging around Thursday morning as he led a couple of visitors to the birds’ new dwelling place, a cluster of gourd-shaped plastic houses atop a tall metal pole.
The white houses are set among the acres of sunflowers and patches of bright wildflowers at St. Luke’s Hospital-Anderson Campus in Bethlehem Township, where a vast swath of the 500-acre property is given over to nature and overseen by Fiorini, the health network’s director of landscape services.
As luck had it, a martin was perched atop one of the houses, albeit briefly. There were, presumably, bugs to catch — martins eat them practically by the pound — so it flitted off into the late-morning sun as the visitors drew near.
It was a heartening sight. Purple martins, a type of swallow and the largest of the North American varieties, were once common in the Lehigh Valley, but their numbers have fallen over the years. Farmers attracted them by erecting houses, because they eat crop-damaging insects, but as farmland vanished, so did the birds.
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