Well, he pointed out that there was the mother wood duck and her little babies scurrying along the beach. She must have nudged them out of the nest this morning and they were on their way for their first swim.
I don't have a good photo of wood ducks so I scanned this one from my Birds of Minnesota Field Guide. I love that book and have marked all of the pages with birds that I've spotted right in our own yard. Very cool. The male wood duck is gorgeous. He almost looks like a carved decoy with beautifully painted markings. They are just beautiful.Anyway, we've had trouble getting wood ducks to nest in our wood duck house. Haven't a clue why. But luckily this year they decided that they'd settle for it.
I grabbed my camera and we tried to get out on the deck without startling them but they slipped into the water as soon as they sensed us. This is the only photo I could get - not great but better than nothing. The photo below is of the wood duck house that Jack placed in the cottonwood tree by the beach. Must have been five or six years ago and as far as I can tell, this is the first year we actually had a family in to.
Just a couple of interesting facts about wood ducks from my Birds of Minnesota Field Guide:
- They're 17" - 20" in length.
- They lay 10 to 15 creamy white eggs and will lay them in old woodpecker cavities or nest boxes (like ours)
- The female enters the nest cavity from full flight! Whoa!
- Sometimes females will lay eggs in a neighboring female nest (called egg dumping) so one female may end up with more than 20 eggs to hatch.
- After the babies hatch they stay in the nest only 24 hours and then they jump out of the nest which can be as high as 30 feet. Ours isn't that high but it's still quite a jump. Then they follow the mother into the water never to return to the nest.
- They were almost extinct around 1900. Overhunted. But now they are thriving. I'm so glad about that.
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