Baby Wood Ducks and Other Cavity Nesters

Success!! All the climbing & balancing in trees to get the big wood duck house down to repair it & mount it on a pole with predator baffle has paid off. Yesterday morning we were greeted by 12-14 wood duck ducklings in the river right by the box. We checked the box today and found the egg shells inside all stacked nicely like nester dolls. The other box that we made from cypress scraps has a wood duck hen sitting on about 10 eggs.

Everything is late down here in south LA. In the smaller houses we have 3 Chickadee nests, 2 with 6 eggs each and the Eastern Bluebirds have finally built a nest in one by the pond. We built 2 sizes of smaller (with 1 1/4" holes) than bluebird spec houses for the chickadees & prothonotary warblers this year. So far the chickadees are using one of the small houses, 1 that is shorter than a standard NABS house & one old one from Wal Mart. The Prothonotary males are back, darting around and staking out territory & houses.

A Carolina wren has forsaken all of the houses and is sitting on eggs in a nest in the top hole of a pair of cinder blocks that we stacked and used as a saw horse to make the nest boxes! We found another nest, without eggs, inside the upturned canoe that was stored on the bluff by the river. A friend found a nest in a fitted sheet that had been hanging on a line for a couple of days. They really do build in the strangest places.