Earth Day and Purple Martin Palooza 2025: Maintaining Our Commitment To Enhancing Our Local Environment
For many years, the Walt Disney World® Golf courses have been certified by Audubon International as Cooperative Wildlife Sanctuaries. We take great pride in this accomplishment as part of our commitment to environmental stewardships across our facilities. Our golf courses are designated and accredited by the Audubon Cooperative Wildlife Sanctuary program, which helps guide our agronomic maintenance planning with a focus on the environmental effects of our actions.
In recognition of Earth Day 2025, which is on Tuesday, April 22, we wanted to take a moment to illustrate how we continue and expand on that commitment by celebrating Purple Martin Palooza 2025.
Many years ago, we installed purple martin nesting facilities at Disney's Magnolia Golf Course. If you have visited the course recently, you may have noticed these structures.
Purple martins are the largest members of the swallow family and are considered a priority bird species here in the state of Florida. They annually migrate several thousand miles from Brazil in South America, over land via Central America and Mexico, and arrive here in Central Florida around December to January.
In an effort to support their migration and breeding habits, human-built nesting structures, such as those that we have installed Walt Disney World® Golf, are commonly used. There are also clusters of purple martin nests elsewhere around the Walt Disney World® Resort.
The birds will begin to nest upon arrival, and trained Disney’s Animals, Science and Environment Cast Members from Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park come onsite to engage in weekly scheduled checks of the nests to monitor the progress of the feathered guests and count their eggs. The nest compartments are attached to a cabled mechanism that allows them to be lowered and raised, and there are side caps on the nest compartments that allow for visual observation of the nests inside. Some of the purple martins may be tagged with GPS tracking devices or other identification tags from prior interactions with research staff to record their movements.
Disney’s Animals, Science, and Environment Cast Members will also photograph, band and document the activity of the purple martins around the nesting structures.
Once the winter-to-summer nesting and breeding cycle has been completed, and the newly hatched purple martins are mature enough to leave the nest and fly long distances, they will begin their migration back to South America around June or July, as our summer begins. Purple martins tend to return each year once they establish a breeding location, so we anticipate a regular presence of them at the Walt Disney World Resort well into the future.
This is an exciting part of what we do at Walt Disney World® Golf! We hope to share this experience with you in person on Friday April 25th, 2025 as we invite you to observe and participate in the conservation research of the purple martins at Disney's Magnolia Golf Course! You are invited to join us from 7-8:30 a.m.!
We look forward to welcoming you to the "Happiest Place on TURF!", and the next time you play, keep an eye out for the purple martin nests! You may also spot owl, kestrel, and bluebird boxes scattered around our facilities, as well as many other native bird species that call our courses home!
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