What Are Those Weird Towers at EPCOT?

 by Beth Keating

Parks Visit

DisneyBizJournal.com

April 24, 2024

 

There’s an unwritten rule at Disney that no matter where you are in the Resort, you need to look up, down and sideways because the Imagineers “fill in all available spaces,” and if you aren’t looking up-down-and-sideways, you’ll be missing important stuff.  Sidewalks aren’t just sidewalks, and plants and trees are often chosen for reasons other than just aesthetics.

If you’ve hurried along the World Showcase bridge recently, and didn’t raise your eyes to the sky, you may have overlooked a very neat detail.  On the Odyssey pavilion side of the bridge, you’ll find a half dozen strangely shaped towers, and you may have wondered what these sci-fi looking spires were.

  
Those poles are home to Disney’s visiting Purple Martin families.  For more than two decades, EPCOT has played host to visiting Purple Martins as part of Disney’s conservation efforts, and you can learn more about them at the 2024 International Flower & Garden Festival.

   
Purple Martins make their home throughout North and South America, migrating to North America to nest. These songbirds are only native to the Americas, and will often travel thousands of miles during their yearly migration. Their journey northward from their warmer winter homes brings them through Florida in late January or early February, meaning that their arrival fortuitously coincides with the EPCOT Flower & Garden Festival. They will stick around until early to mid-summer when they finish nesting.

  
And that’s what those weirdly shaped towers are for – a place for momma and poppa martin to hatch their babies. If you look closely, you’ll see that the individual, gourd-shaped houses are lettered and numbered, so that observers and researchers can keep track of the new little families. Bonus? The Purple Martins often return to the same breeding site, year after year if they liked the digs the first time around.  According to the Purple Martin Conservation Association, “East of the Rocky Mountains, Purple Martins nest almost exclusively in human-supplied housing. They are dependent on us for their survival.”

I may have noticed the nesting towers a few years back, not because I’m more observant than the average Disney fan, but because, many moons ago, when I worked in suburban government in New York, we had a town wide project to increase the number of Purple Martin colonies visiting our area.  (Fun fact: Purple Martins eat while flying, making them especially lethal to the local flying bug populations.)  So, to combat our area’s mosquito population without resorting to more chemical means, one of our councilmen dreamed up the idea of encouraging residents to post their own Purple Martin houses.  Soon, local scout troops, schools and individual families were picking up plans to design Purple Martin houses for these members of the swallow family, and the birds were welcomed with open wings… err, arms. Or at least, available housing units.

In Florida, nearly one-third of Walt Disney World Resort has been set aside as a protected area. That’s 8,000 acres of wetland and upland habitats in which a wide variety of critters make their homes (and not just the Florida gators or the animatronic creatures!). More than 200 different species of birds feather their nests at Walt Disney World, both seasonally and permanently. You aren’t the only one who wishes they never had to leave the most magical place on earth!  Central Florida is on the flight path for many kinds of migratory birds, and like countless families, they too enjoy making a vacation pitstop in Lake Buena Vista along the way.

   
The EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival runs through May 27, 2024.   Stop by and see if you can spot a Purple Martin or two.  

 

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Beth Keating is a theme parks, restaurant and entertainment reporter for DisneyBizJournal.

 

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