These nest box plans are suitable for wood ducks, hooded mergansers, screech owls and kestrels. Installing and maintaining wood duck boxes is a popular pastime. Improved design, placement and maintenance practices have significantly lowered a formerly high duckling mortality rate. Usually the day after the eggs all hatch, the parents coax the young ducklings to jump from the nest sometimes incredibly high and then lead the ducklings to water where they learn to forage.

 

Common mergansers inhabit broad ranges of North America. They build nests in tree hollows, cliffs and they nest in boxes provided especially for them. Females lay six to sixteen ivory-white eggs around June which hatch after about one month of incubation. Young are led to water, tended to while still quite young and learn to fly at about two months.

 

Barrow’s Goldeneyes raise their broods in the far north, the furthest south being in the mountains of Wyoming and Oregon and in the east as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Ducklings are led to water at a very young age and fly at about two months age. Please follow the latest best practices that protect newly hatched ducklings in nest boxes from predators.

 

Goldeneyes raise broods in the northern regions throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The Common Goldeneye nests in the northern U.S., southern Alaska and most of Canada. They tolerate cold weather well being driven south only by frozen water where they dive for fish, frogs, shell fish and tender plant roots and seeds. In warmer weather they also eat insects.

 

Buffleheads breed in the northern regions – Alaska, across Canada to the lower Hudson Bay Region and Quebec; the furthest south being in the mountainous regions of Wyoming and Northern California. Builds a thick cushion of feathers and down often in aspen and poplar tree cavities bored out, used and abandoned by flickers or in decaying tree and stump hollows and nest boxes near ponds and streams.

 

Black-bellied whistling ducks breed from southern Arizona and south-central and southeastern Texas through Mexico and Central America. Wood ducks typically nest well before black-bellied whistling ducks. It is possible that both might nest in a tree cavity or nest box in the same season. Black-bellied whistling ducks usually raise two broods in a season.