A male wood duck takes flight at the Celery Farm

By Jim Wright

Special to The Record | USA TODAY NETWORK - NEW JERSEY

   Last spring, I wrote about an innovative design for nest boxes for wood ducks, and I promised to write an update after the project's first phase was over.

  Although wood ducks love to nest in North Jersey
each spring, they often face a housing shortage. As human populations have expanded, they’ve had fewer places to nest.

These ducks merit this special attention because they’re among the world’s most beautiful waterfowl. The males have incredibly colorful plumage, and the females’ distinctive oval eyes are worthy of Cleopatra.

   To ease the housing crunch in years past, naturalists built large wooden nest boxes and placed them on tree trunks in their traditional breeding areas near water. Alas, the boxes also proved popular with raccoons that liked to pilfer duck eggs and with squirrels that wanted to nest there.   

   Naturalists also placed the boxes on poles on nearby ponds and streams or on poles with baffles. The trouble was, you had to ram poles into the ground, and the boxes were often difficult to monitor and maintain,

A year ago, my book about screech owls came out, and one of its selling points has been an innovative nest box designed by my coauthor, Scott Weston. Scott’s nest box features a roof so steeply pitched that squirrels slide off before they reach the opening.

     Since then, Scott started using a new product called Acre board, made from recycled rice hulls. It’s an effective building material for nestboxes because the board’s durable surface is too slick for the critters to hold onto.

   I realized that slightly larger versions of these squirrel-resistant nest boxes might help solve the wood-duck housing shortage at my local nature preserve, the Celery Farm in Allendale. A volunteer built eight boxes, and last spring we placed them on trees there just in time for nesting season. Then we waited.

   Three months later, we inspected all eight boxes, using a selfie stick to take photos of the interior of each box. To our delight, we found that wood ducks appeared to have nested in four of them – a 50 percent success rate right off the bat.  

    Confirming the project’s overall success, birders counted an abundance of wood ducks on the nature preserve’s lake this past summer.

The only disappointment: In one box, an intruder had punctured several eggs. The likeliest suspects are starlings, known for commandeering other birds’ nest cavities. (If you've come up with a way to thwart starlings, I’m all ears.)

      Our plan is to keep the boxes in place for three breeding seasons so that the ducks have plenty of time to find all of them and move in. If any box goes unused, we can relocate it in hopes of increasing the odds of attracting a nesting pair.

   The Bird Watcher column appears every other Thursday.  Email Jim at [email protected]

The Redpoll is an arctic songbird that lives in Canada and, in winter, the most northern reaches of the United States. For three years, I had the privilege of living in the northern Adirondacks of New York, the very southern extent of the redpoll’s range. Many birders travel to the Adirondacks to see special “boreal” birds, including the redpoll.

And like most birds with “common” in its name (or at least until the AOS lumped all the redpolls last September, doing away with the "common"), the redpoll is not in fact so common. This song is sung from the perspective of a birder whose deepest desire is to see a Redpoll. It is a parody of “Luck Be a Lady” as sung by Frank Sinatra in the musical “Guys and Dolls.” Vocals by me. Backing track by BellySings Karaoke.

Thanks, Michael!

This is a mystery that sparrow aficionados will likely solve right away.

I grabbed a photo of the above little brown job at Wave Hill yesterday just before it flew... I checked the I.D. on my Merlin photo app but it just didn't seem right. And the list of suspects for Wave Hill on eBird didn't ring any bells.

What is it?

Stopped by The Nature Conservancy's High Mountain yesterday to visit two of my favorite spots, Buttermilk Falls and the Clove. The former should be called Icemilk Falls at this point.

Bird life was limited to umpteen Dark-eyed Juncos and a loud but elusive Pileated Woodpecker.

Including a rock-formation photo for columnar basalt enthusiasts...