...which appears to not bother them a bit.
This arrival is followed by the hooded mergansers. The male has the white patch on its hood. They are fish eaters -- small stuff like minnows. I don't worry about the trout in the pond, some of which are big enough to eat the merganser!😀
Then come the mallards. This, of course, is a green headed male.
And last to show up are the wood ducks. The male is the magnificently colored dude below, and is only challenged in color by the male arctic harlequin or Asian mandarin ducks, of which I have no pictures. However I still think the wood duck male wins the competition.
I am always excited to see these wood ducks, as they love my four tree boxes for nesting, and use them all - after the competition has been resolved. Note the female entering the box. The labeling on the bottom of the picture is from my 'game' camera.
All of the wild birds get along fine, and actually hang out together. The spring grass below is covered with buds from the aspens. Nobody eats them.
The only trouble with having the wild birds in the yard is after hatching their clutches, they only hang around for a relatively short period of time (days or a few weeks) and then WALK away with their chicks. This must be very dangerous for them -- walking through the bush in coyote/raccoon country -- but they do it anyway. I suspect many go to my neighbor, Pat O'Grady's, down the road a quarter mile or so to the south of us to his Ducks Unlimited built lake ~150 acres in June. Thus, when this happens, I have no ducks for the rest of the summer. To remedy this a few years ago, when I mentioned my concern to Pat's son Danny who lives the same distance to the north or me, he captured for me two of his semi-domestic Muscovy ducks; one male and one female. This relative large bird originally was native to South America (Argentina), but has been moving slowly to the north (mainly to Florida), as well as has been transplanted to many areas in the 'far' Canadian north. It has not become 'wild', and likes to hang around and be fed. As they were still in a reproductive mode (July), Danny suggested giving them an old dog house, like the one I had at camp, to use as a nesting box. Below is the pair. Note the 'wart red spots' on the male's face. This is very common in the Muscovy males, while the female's spots are much less obvious.
Although they bred repeatedly over the next week or so, and the female laid her eggs in the dog house, which I had placed in the woods near the pond, she lost the eggs every night to a raccoon. And then one day, she disappeared (perhaps killed) so the male was now alone. I felt badly for him being alone every day. As a result, after a few weeks I found 2 sisters at another farm that were available and I presented them to him.
Apparently he was so pleased, he mounted one immediately.
There were no more eggs, however, as the breeding season was over (end of July). The 3 birds survived to the fall in the pond, but not beyond (by my hand) 😒.
As the nesting experiment was not a complete success with the dog house on the land, I thought it might work to fool the predators if it was in the middle of the pond! So a new project was devised for the next year; one which involved putting the dog house on a raft in the middle of the trout pond to see if the ducks could learn to use it, and use it successfully. Thus the following winter, I built the new dog house system on the ice, so that in the spring it would simply float and I could anchor it wherever I thought it should go. In this picture, the spring thaw has begun and the log raft is partly frozen and stuck in the ice. It floated free a few days later.
As soon as the ice backed off, I obtained a new pair of Muscovy's that I hoped I could train to use the dog cage (the cage can be seen slightly at the top of the picture out in the ice just beyond the dock platform).
When the raft was clear of the ice, I floated the cage to the shore and secured there with easy access for the birds.
After baiting it with corn, and putting a board ramp up to the platform, they began to visit frequently, and occasionally went inside!
Most of the time, however, they would lounge around under small bushes at the edge of the shore, where they could quickly escape into the pond if a predator showed up.
Although the hen hung around on the shore much of the time, she did start going into the box by herself on a daily basis, but only for a short time, presumably to lay an egg. Afterwards she would return to the yard to feed. Over subsequent days, she stayed on the nest and incubate her accumulating eggs for much of the day, but would come out a few times during the day to feed. And then one day she did not. After we had not seen her for a few days, I decided to canoe out to the cage and check her out. The cage has two internal compartments, so to access her in the second compartment for me was difficult because I was in the canoe. Thus I used my camera and my 'long' arm to view her and what she was up to. And there she was -- on her nest, but not moving and apparently dead! I retrieve her body and the two eggs she was sitting on. This picture is only her back, which was recorded with the camera at the end of my reach.
And her eggs were huge. Since she wasn't killed by some critter and appeared in perfect shape, I suspected that her eggs were so big that the last undelivered one may have killed her??
Thus the project was over for that year. Ironically I still have her eggs here in a tray of small stones from Lake Superior. No odor from the eggs.
The next summer, I had no domestic duck plans, but one day a large Muscovy male appeared like magic in the yard and apparently liked our trout pond. Exactly where he came from we have no idea. Muscovies can fly so he could have come from anywhere. I thought maybe he was from Danny O'Grady's up the road, but his dad said the coyotes had killed all of his birds already. So the duck stayed and we called him Marvin. Marvin was a handsome bird who liked the water and, obviously, could fly.
Marvin also liked the geese and hung out with them.
When they would go somewhere, he to would follow them on land or in the water.
But once the geese did their summer migration with their chicks, Marvin was left alone. He spent the season alone but did not leave. By the end of the fall the 'experiment' was all over again.
The next spring I did not have a new plan. But because the 'doghouse' (or by now, the duck house) was still in the pond, my daughter-in-law, Tracey thought it would be fun to put the ducks that she had hatched in her kindergarten class in the pond to see how they would do. As the summer progressed, they survived and thrived. It appeared that two were French Rouen ducks (brown) and three were white Peking females.
By some miracle they survived the summer, so we trapped them in the fall and over-wintered them at a friend's farm. They were returned in the spring to see if they would use the dog cage for incubating eggs. They were very pretty birds, especially the two Rouens. With their new adult feathers, it was clear that one Rouen was a male (who looked like a giant male mallard) and the brown one was a female. You would never guess that the two Rouens simply were not big mallards.
As the breeding season was soon upon them, they began to use the cage platform for resting and then for laying eggs. In the picture below are the 3 white Peking females and the tail of the Rouen female sticking out of the house door as the male Rouen swims by. This past July we were in the grip of a drought, so the water level in the pond was down about 6 feet. In the spring the water was 2 feet above the limestone shelf you see in the background.
Soon after this period, however, two of the Peking females 'disappeared'. One bird I saw being killed in the yard by a big fat raccoon before I could save her -- as I was in the upper reaches of the house at the time. The two surviving hens (one Peking and the Rouen) were laying eggs and coming back and forth daily to the yard for corn. Then one day that did not show up. Again I canoed out to the cage to see what was up and removed the end of the cage with my chain saw to access the nesting compartment. There were lots of eggs evident, but just one dead bird on site. The other one was gone and presumed it too had been killed and removed. After talking to my hunting friend and local trapper, Gord Hill, he suspected a raccoon was the culprit. I didn't realize that that raccoons are good swimmers, as I have only seen them hunting crayfish at the shoreline, so it would have been easy for him to trap the hens in the cage and dispatch them. Damn... I trapped the raccoon the next day in a live trap and then he disappeared.
And a closer view of the nest ...
All together there were 22 intact eggs (not including the broken and eaten eggs, one of which can be seen in the back ground of the above picture). I collected the eggs and Tracey tried to incubate some of them at home, which succeed somewhat, as two hatched, but later died. Below are the eggs on their way to the incubator. The color differences were slight, but one is bluish and the other white, likely reflecting the two different species of the mothers (Rouen and Peking).
As the project's thesis was to see if the duck hens would use the box to nest in, "the experiment was a success, but unfortunately the patients died". This left only the male Rouen alive, who now foraged on his own most of the time.
However he did get to hang around with smaller wild male mallards until they too disappear in early fall (as well as every night during the summer). When our Rouen was alone, he used the cage platform for roosting, but wisely did not go inside and thus avoided being trapped like the hens.
He did have to share the platform daily with up to a dozen painted turtles and an occasion a great blue heron.
The cage currently is sleeping under a foot of snow, so we will have to wait until spring to see what the next season has to offer. Being mildly demented I might just try it again 😏.
Due North: providing a steady supply of high quality duck meat to the north country predators for 4+ years.
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