Brian Payton is the award-winning author of Shadow of the Bear, The Ice Passage, and the national bestselling novel The Wind Is Not a River. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Canadian Geographic. He lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
In springtime in North America, purple martins spread joy as they return to their nest boxes—is that enough motivation for us to ward off an avian housing crisis?