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Male wood ducks are among the most colorful of all American birds. (Photo by Arkansas Game and Fish Commission) Wood duck most beautiful waterfowl Saturday, Apr 12, 2008 By Joe Mosby Many Arkansans regard the wood duck as the most beautiful of American waterfowl. It also gives us a lesson about conservation that we seldom take time to absorb. The comeback of the wood duck has been a true success story, brought about in part by a couple of Illinois fellows who discovered the birds readily took to man-made wooden nesting boxes. Art Hawkins and Frank Bellrose in 1937 convinced the U.S. Biological Survey (today's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to erect 486 bark-covered slab wooden boxes at the Chatauqua National Wildlife Refuge in central Illinois. Ducks quickly made use of many of them. Over the next two years, Hawkins and Bellrose switched to rough-cut cypress for lumber and built and put up 700 more boxes in many areas of Illinois. More than half of these boxes were used by wood ducks, and Bellrose's writing spread the word. In the 70 years since, many thousands of wood duck boxes have been constructed and erected by a variety of people and organizations ? Boy Scout troops, high school woodshop classes, wildlife agencies, retirees and duck hunters themselves. In Arkansas, wood ducks have come back as much or more than other areas in mid-continent. The colorful birds are found over much of the nation and southern Canada. Some migrate. Some don't. Arkansas wood ducks stay close to home year-round, biologists tell us, and in cold times they share the territory with woodies from up north where snow and ice cover up food sources. Wood ducks, however, don't make it to the yearly population surveys collected by the Fish and Wildlife Service through extensive aerial work in the breeding grounds of Canada and the upper Midwest. They don't count the wood ducks like they do mallards, teal, pintails and scaup for the simple reason they can't see them. Wood ducks live in woods. The others are on open prairies. In the early part of the last century, wood duck numbers fell so low that hunting was stopped in 1918. Slowly they came back and hunting was resumed, but with restrictions. Those remain in place today ? just two wood ducks can be taken in a daily bag limit. Wood ducks and Arkansas just go hand in hand. The birds are versatile and not fussy about where they live, what they eat or babying their babies in the nests. One of nature's remarkable features is a mother wood duck flying out of a nest then calling to the young ones to jump down. They are only a few days old, have down rather than feathers and can't fly. But they jump, sometimes from astounding heights, float gently to the ground then line up and follow momma to the water. These wood duck baby jumps have been recorded from as high as 290 feet. Much more common are 10-, 20-, 30-foot jumps. Some nests, especially those in boxes put up by humans, are on the edge of lakes, ponds, streams and sloughs. Some, though, can be one-quarter mile or more from water. A wood duck family became favorites in Augusta in the 1980s. Water was about five city blocks from their nest. Residents watched eagerly for the babies to leave the nest in a large tree close to a house. People would walk with the parade of wood ducks, making sure traffic stopped on the four streets they had to cross. Acorns are favorite food for wood ducks as they are for many other species of ducks. Wood ducks make use of other foods like fruit, insects, snails and water invertebrates. Life for them is hazardous, though. The babies are especially vulnerable until they can fly. Raccoons are notorious for attacking wood ducks in nests and on the ground. Turtles pick off a number of the young ones in the water. Today, wood duck numbers are hard to calculate, but assumption by waterfowl biologists is that they are stable in numbers in Arkansas and the surrounding area. No red flags of a decline in their numbers have come forth. -------- Joe Mosby is the retired news editor of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and Arkansas' best known outdoor writer. His work is distributed by the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. He can be reached by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com. |
