Friday, February 1, 2013

Mallard Duck Nesting Tubes Revised


Our mallard duck nesting tube project has been one of our most viewed projects on the blog over the past year.  As this was a project Bill and Mitch designed in house there were some aspects that we did not account for and so in order to prepare the nesting tubes for the upcoming nesting season we made some minor changes and improvements.




 

 The biggest issue that we noticed with the construction of the nesting tubes was that the large 2" x 3" openings in the coated garden fencing allowed the pine straw to become dislodged during heavy rain storms.  In order to compensate for this problem we decided to bring the nesting tubes in, disassemble them, and add a layer of chicken coop wire around the outside of the inner tube.






 New pine straw was spread over the remaining nesting tube fencing.



The nesting tube was rolled back up and secured with new hog rings.

Here's Mitch with the "new and improved" mallard duck nesting tube.  They also added a small platform on the front of the nesting tube for the ducks to land on or use as a diving board when it comes time to go swimming.  Even mallard ducks need a little fun, once in a while.


Mitch and Willie decided that today, even though it was only in the upper 20s, would be a great day to reinstall the nesting tubes in the irrigation lake.

The forethought of using the U channel road signs came in very handy as it made reinstalling the nesting tubes rather easy, although rather cold.  The tubes were refilled with broomsedge and straw from the surrounding area and the nesting tubes were positioned so the platform would be facing out to the water.

The nesting tubes have all been renovated and reinstalled in the irrigation lake.  We are hopeful for a successful nesting season with many little mallard ducklings to follow.


Thanks to Mitch, Bill, and Willie for all their hard work and dedication.




1 comment:

  1. This and the previous article are super, the photos really help. We have mallards on our small pond of 2500m² and they nest successfully in our flowerbeds! They are very good at finding hidden places under foliage cover - they really like burrowing under ornamental grasses. I'm looking at this with a view to providing extra nesting places as we generally have a flock of about 20-30 over each winter (all home bred, we think) but generally only a couple of pairs nest here so we'd like to encourage more.

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