East nest – no second round
Well, I jinxed it. In my post a week ago I wrote that it looked like a duck was going to use the East nest again but it now seems this is not going to happen. Although a wood duck laid 5 eggs and a merganser hen visited a few times (no eggs) that ended a week ago. A wood duck did visit the nest for about 2 minutes on Friday but did not stay, and except for that there was no other activity there in the past week. The five eggs are still in there and I’ll leave things as-is for a while longer, but I now doubt they’re going to go for a second round in that nest.
On the other side of the yard, the west nest hen is diligently incubating 10 eggs and there should be ducklings sometime around the 4th of July, give or take a day or a few.