A new development

Last night was business as usual for our Wood Duck mother-to-be.  She arrived on the nest just before 8pm where she remained all night long.  Every 30 minutes or so throughout the night she rotated her big pile of eggs while pulling a significant amount of down from underneath her feathers that made things all fluffy and warm in there.  She left the nest this morning around 6:45am, but not before covering everything up in all that beautiful down.

Shortly afterward, we noticed a new, second pair of Wood Ducks paddling around the pond.  Then, at 7:30am, one female entered the box.  The behavior of this female was not like that of the one we're used to seeing, so I suspect this female was an interloper.  Upon entering the nest box, this one stood up and wiggled her feet down into the nest (feeling around for eggs, I think; or worse, maybe damaging some of them?), and there was a good amount of wing-flapping during the short one minute that she was in there.

 

 

This foreign female rejoined the other three, and for the next hour we watched one pair of Wood Ducks calmly follow the other pair around the pond. (By the way, all the while our pair of Canada Geese remained unfazed by this Duck Drama unfolding before them.)  At 8:23, nearly an hour after the interloper appeared in the nest box, a female returned to the nest.  It seemed she was putting things back in order, poking her bill way down deep into the nest and carefully getting everything properly covered.

As you know from my blog posts in previous years, we're not certain whether any of our Wood Duck broods have ever come to fruition because we've never actually seen any ducklings.  We know that eggs always get laid because when we clean out the box after the breeding season, we typically find 3 or 4 broken eggshells among several whole abandoned ones.  We also know that every year, multiple Wood Duck pairs arrive around the same time and they all get very interested in this one nest box.  So a couple of years ago, we put up a second nest box, about 100 yards away in the woods, along the pondshore so it's not too far from the water.  But oddly, no ducks ever take up residence in that box, even though it is identical to the one in the water.  So I wonder if we are encouraging some sort of unnatural nesting behavior with the manmade nest boxes...especially since we have several natural and ideal cavities in our many snags around our property.  I'll keep you posted.