Wood Duck Nest Boxes Ready for Next Year
December 30, 2017
Six of us Celery Farmers braved the cold and wind to clean out the Wood Duck nesting boxes on Lake Appert and put in fresh sawdust.
If you check out the one photo below, you can see the little ladder that baby Wood Ducks climb to leave the nest the day they hatch in the spring.
(The photo on the right by Jerry Barrack is of a male and female Wood Duck atop one of the boxes in the spring.)
Most of the boxes had at least one unhatched Wood Duck egg, A few of them exploded on the ice, which made me jump at first.
Bird of the day -- the only bird of the day -- was a Bald Eagle.
We did the maintenance on five of the seven boxes.The other two were broken.
One had been ripped down by skaters some time yesterday, so we will have to replace it.
Ditto one that hockey players destroyed last year.
Just like the Wood Duck boxes, there can be a bad egg or two.