Nest box murder
One of those times, when your best is just not good enough.
This is what I discovered yesterday when doing nest box checks. This late Mrs Wood was our first sitting duck of the season, she started sitting 3+ weeks ago on a small clutch of eggs. The eggs are gone, and there is a large blood spatter on the exit wall of the box. She has been dead for a week or so.
Who dunnit?
I don’t know! My wildlife cameras had been occupied elsewhere, looking for feral predators and watching trap sets, or recording possum antics on my experimental possum guard testing tree.
Probably someone with wings. Unlikely to be a Brushtail possum, cat or fox with the possum guards installed above & below the nest box. These guards wouldn’t exclude a Sugar Glider (I use a slightly different method), but I had assumed duck eggs & Ducks are a bit above their size to take on. Whoever it was, took her eggs and wasn’t keen on duck for dinner. How strange is that? Or it was something that wanted her nest box?
I’ve cleaned the nest box out, added a chicken egg and installed two cameras to document a return visit. I’ve put a camera on our other almost-time-to-sit Wood Duck nest box too, with a hoard of 18 eggs. Fingers crossed this nest box stays safe.
While death by a native animal is just a natural thing (albeit very sad for me), if I have installed nest boxes in locations and ways that make their occupants very vulnerable to predators, that is something that I want to know about and fix. With very few natural hollows in my local previously cleared, regenerating landscape, species needing hollows to nest will select sub-optimum sites in desperation.
Survival, it’s risky business for Ducks. Many critters including Brushtails, Ravens & Currawongs will raid duck nests for eggs before sitting begins, I also have footage of a Brushtail trying to kill a sitting Wood Duck by night. All predators native & feral will take ducklings out and about if they can, with duck families especially vulnerable while sleeping on the ground for months before ducklings grow feathered wings. With few tree hollows, many feral predators, and fast cars on rural roads, it’s no wonder locally, teenage ducklings are a rare sight.
In the next week or two, I’ll paint the (deadly) nest box in woodland bark colours and relocate it to a more discrete location. Hopefully that will do the trick. And closely monitor all duck boxes from now.