West Nest Jump Day

06Jun

At about 10:20 CDT on Thursday June 5th the hooded merganser called her ducklings to follow her out into the world. There were 8 merganser and 6 wood duck ducklings.

One of the ducklings was very late getting out of the nest box, but finally it jumped out and found its way down to the creek many minutes after the family had left the area. It was joined by another little wood duck that got separated from the group somehow. They peeped loudly and tried to swim upstream but the current was strong and they weren’t sure where to go.

The mother duck led her family back and forth upstream for a while, then eventually went downstream past the place where the two were stranded. We saw one of the ducklings join in. Maybe the other one did too.

After a last look back, …

… the family went downstream. There are some wide quiet places and eventually a lake in that direction. We almost never see them again. (22 second video)

Camera Issues – resolved

05Jun

The west nest camera failed yesterday and overnight: extremely blurry image. Then the outdoor camera stopped working this morning with constant buffering. Both are now swapped out and both views now seem to be okay. Kind of a scramble!

The momma duck is off having some breakfast as of 8:50am CDT.

Jump day = <your guess here>

04Jun

I wish these ducklings had more respect for us viewers and would hatch overnight as any polite and considerate batch of ducklings would do! But they’re mostly out now at 4:00pm CDT and looking very active and strong. I’ve seen at least one egg that is still hatching and at least one that probably won’t. This is starting to seem like a repeat of the East nest 2 weeks ago when all of us watched for a whole day because they might go, but then they didn’t and stayed overnight again and jumped very early the next morning.

Ducklings need about 20 hours or so in the nest box to get strong enough to leave. So doing the math: afternoon + 20 says it could be late tomorrow morning (or maybe not so late? see the “about” and “or so” in the previous sentence). Only momma duck knows and she hasn’t decided yet.

I can say with complete confidence that they will jump either tomorrow or Friday. Sorry. Best I can do with ducklings that hatch during the day. I’m sending this to let you know that I don’t know!

Some of you probably saw me cleaning the lenses and resetting the camera a short time ago. I don’t know why the color image is so hazy. For now I’ve set it to stay in grayscale mode.

I’m going to enable the outdoor camera for you to see.

I took this picture by putting the top of my phone through the nest box door at about 4:05pm CDT. All five of them on the right and at the top are hooded mergansers. Two sleepy ones on the left are wood ducks. There are more under the pile: looks like maybe two on the top left and one whose bottom is bottom center. Two wood duck eggs that have not yet hatched are on the left.