Yes, Fred, they’re back again as usual. After reading your message, I grabbed my camera and took the attached photo. The timeline on that shot shows it was less than 3 hours after your email came in. Had I been a bit quicker, there would have been two pair of Woodies in that shot, and on a typical day we’ll se up to 3 or more pair there where I throw out ground field corn to supplement their wild food. I still have four nesting boxes, one of which is occupied by Wood Ducks, two by broods of baby Black Squirrels, and the fourth with questionable occupancy, although I think it likely has a nesting Wood Duck in it, as we saw one enter a couple weeks ago. That we’re still seeing ducks in trees suggests that those that were too late to stake a claim to available nesting space are still waiting for something to re-open, or else are watching their chances and “dropping” an occasional egg into an already occupied nest as the species is known to do. We’ve also had a pair of Hooded Mergansers on the river, so they may well be adding an occasional egg to a Woodie’s nest on the way to producing a mixed-species clutch such as we witnessed in one past year. This year a pair of Mallards has been sharing (sometimes domineering) the cracked corn table.
Always good to see your posts and to consider your thoughtful speculation about our feathered friends.
Good point John. P.S. Do you have Wood Ducks again this year? Every time I see a message from you I think about Wood Ducks. There was a pair clumsily perched in a tree here the other day but the nest box I have up for them seems to be full of leaves again. Probably squirrels in there I suppose although I’ve not seen anything coming or going from that box yet this year.
Fred Kaluza
Senior Engineer of R.F. Design and Regulatory Compliance for Michigan and Indiana
Dody’s posting this morning was a timely reminder to check our nesting box. I’d seen a finished, but still empty, nest there on Tuesday, so I checked again after Dody’s post. Voila! Two eggs today! (The second is just barely visible to the right of the visible one, just inside the lip of the nest. With nesting and egg laying now underway, I’m posting this <https://www.nabluebirdsociety.org/PDF/NABSFactsheetMealworms.pdf> reminder of the importance of suspending feeding of dried mealworms bluebird parents now to spare the nestlings the sad fate we observed a few years ago before we learned that dried mealworms fed by parent birds can be fatal to the nestlings whose only source of hydration is the moisture within the bodies of live insect larvae they are given as food.
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