The Nashville Symphony’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center may be closed to performances until July 2021, but the thousands of migrating birds that flocked to the neighborhood this summer didn’t know that. The purple martins—rarely seen in North American cities—chose to roost in trees near the concert hall’s plaza before heading south for the winter, and attracted birders from far and wide. Unfortunately, because there were so many birds—about 150,000 of them—there was concern they could damage the limestone exterior of the concert hall and the plaza. The orchestra hired a company to move the birds, but it discovered via the Tennessee Ornithological Society that the purple martin is protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The organizations ended up working together to let the birds remain a bit longer, and set up a fund-raising campaign to help the orchestra with cleanup costs—raising a total of $26,197, with $21,197 from the public and an additional $5,000 from the Tennessee Wildlife Federation and the Nature Conservancy in Tennessee. “We are profoundly thankful to Tennessee Wildlife Federation, as well as to The Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups, for stepping in and helping raise funds to help us take care of the Schermerhorn,” said Alan D. Valentine, president and CEO of the Nashville Symphony. “We are once again awed by the community’s response in the face of so many challenges we are all facing at the moment.”
Caption: The plaza in front of Nashville Symphony’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center became a temporary roosting site for 150,000 purple martins, which flocked there this summer before migrating south for the winter. Photo by Blake Farmer.
