Nest Box Maintenance

Tommy inspects our Wood Duck nest box.
Monitoring and maintenance is very important for any type of bird house program.

In the early part of the 20th century the Wood Duck populations had almost completely disappeared from their former range. Unregulated market hunting and habitat destruction was a key reason for the decline. The nest box program was introduced in the 1930s and like Bluebird houses has been a important tool, along with hunting regulations, in helping the Wood Duck recover.

Years ago I spent a great deal of time building and installing Wood Duck houses on some of my favorite ponds and swamps. The thinking back then was to place them on poles out in the swamps and ponds. I remember one swamp with 20 duck houses on it, Not all of them mine. This was how we did it, but it was the wrong approach.

There is a behavior called Egg Dumping, or Dump Nest. They discovered one of the causes occurs when the nest boxes are out in the open and close together. A young hen or multiple hens may follow another back to a highly visible box and many times will lay her eggs in the same box. Now the nest has 30 eggs or more instead of the dozen or so. The box is very likely to be abandoned or have a very low hatch rate.
I have witnessed this behavior.

The thought is now fewer boxes and less visible.
We have installed 1 box and built and given away another to a neighbor upriver. We did not install it in time for last season and when we checked and cleaned it out this winter nothing had used it yet.
We plan to install a couple more in very secretive locations and I believe they will be used eventually because we do have a really good Wood Duck population on the river here.
I have also read that the Screech Owl will use the boxes for Winter cover.

Its all about the river.