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Stressless Wood Duck House plans, built installed with predator guard (buy) info

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Great day to get this kinda work done, black ice is safely frozen to 5-6". Got 14 of 16 duck houses done today. All 14 had an active duck nest, 8 had another bird nest built on the hatched and unhatched duck nest that was under it. 10 had 1 or more unhatched duck egg. 13 of 14 had duck eggshells that looked like hatches. Average successful wood duck brood at the start 7. ~91 new woods ducks and two more boxes to check.

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Took a moment in March chores and got my last two wood duck houses out and up yesterday. This new one is in a old beaver pond that filled in and a creek channel runs thru it. About 70 yards upstream from the current beaver pond.
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Beautiful bottom location, thats a total of 18 woody houses up and ready for '23 season. Done with new houses, yearly maintenance, late fall or winter, is once a year removing old eggs, nest litter and putting in new. Takes about 4-5cf of cedar bedding for 18 houses.
 
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Stressless said:
Took a moment in March chores and got my last two wood duck houses out and up yesterday. This new one is in a old beaver pond that filled in and a creek channel runs thru it. About 70 yards upstream from the current beaver pond.
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Beautiful bottom location, thats a total of 18 woody houses up and ready for '23 season. Done with new houses, yearly maintenance, late fall or winter, is once a year removing old eggs, nest litter and putting in new. Takes about 4-5cf of cedar bedding for 18 houses.
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How close are the boxes to each other? , have seen if too many too close they just lay and don’t nest
 
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Josh carpenter said:
How close are the boxes to each other? , have seen if too many too close they just lay and don’t nest
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Interesting, I thought of that after reading some observations awhile ago. What they found in 'dump' nests were where the boxs, specifically openings, were in sight of each other, they experienced a higher rate of dump nests. I made sure that my boxes openings are not in sight of each other and 80% or more can't be seen be another box. I keep track of unopened eggs in each box by year and so far there's no correlation to witch ones have the majority of unhatched eggs to other boxes... 🤓
 
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It's that time of year for Duck Box maintenance, got all of them done except the one that was on a tree and it's submerged in the beaver pond.

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Found a camera I setup and forgot about for 2 years! LoL the browning batteries were dead but the camera works great with new batts and the card had a couple good captures.

Had 5 of 18 duck boxes unused and that was a bit of a shock but I've noticed the numbers of Unhatched eggs and unused boxes were from a the last batch I made I used tools on hand to open them up a bit and will take note of the usage next year.
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Got to the farm and got after the wood duck houses i didn't get to in '25. First 5 or so were looking good, solid signs of successful hatches from '24.
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Also 2/3's or so had secondary nests.

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On one I got a jolt, I knocked, nothing. Unscrew the door block. Open and see a little secondary nest on the wood duck chips, I reached in and MOVEMENT! momma hen wood duck wasn't pleased and I moved the door down and she hopped up thru the hole and took off. Very pretty and somewhat unnerving lol.
Her setup and and a strong clutch of eggs.
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