These birds got a little too comfortable in birdhouses

The Atlantic quoted Heather Williams in a story reporting that  purple martins — shimmery, blackish-bluish swallows native to North America — are abandoning their nests in favor of human made birdhouses. This is partially due to Europeans practicing unsustainable land-management practices that destroyed acres of forested habitat and introducing invasive species such as sparrows, forcing purple martins to find refuge in human made houses. Williams notes that although martins are not formally domesticated, behaviorally speaking, “it kind of feels like they’ve domesticated themselves.”