Club News

Membership renewals

Well, another year is almost over. Time to look ahead to 2007.
Time to make resolutions. Time to resolve to renew your membership in the Ottawa Duck Club.

Your memberships and donations are extremely important to the club. Without them, we would not be able to continue our conservation efforts out at the Shirley’s Bay Crown Game Preserve and at other areas in the City of Ottawa. They provide the funds that enable us to build, paint, install and maintain nest boxes; to maintain and operate our equipment; to send out this newsletter three or four times a year; to pay our insurance and generally to keep the club viable. As a bonus, your membership fees and any donations are tax deductible, so you will receive a tax receipt from the club for them.

Please use the application form enclosed and the return address label. We are entering our 41st year of operations and are hoping for another successful year in 2007. As the Deever (the late Bob Narraway) used to say in his December Newsletters – "Why wait for spring – do it now!"

With the funds we receive, we will be able to make much needed repairs to our buildings and equipment, all of which are getting old (just like the rest of us).

We are also asking for donations of bird seed, or the money to buy it, so we can keep our feeders off March Valley Road stocked through the winter. Incidentally, the feeders are now up, filled and no doubt already busy. Check them out for yourselves and see what birds we’re feeding this winter.

We were very pleasantly surprised recently when a very generous (but anonymous) benefactor offered us the use of some fairly new equipment for grass cutting and bushwhacking next year. It will be a great help.

 

 

CHURCHY’S COLUMN

As we prepare to turn the calendar to 2007, this is a good time to extend our warmest thanks to Lt. Col. J.J.P. Cyr and his staff at the Connaught Range for all their help over the 40 years we’ve been at Shirley’s Bay. The support of the military has always been greatly appreciated and it’s good to know they are still behind us in the work we do.

It’s also a good time, actually past time, to extend a warm welcome to new members Jessica Menchions and George Barry who joined in March and Bob Chadwick who signed up at the Wildlife Festival in April. With our workdays shifting to Saturday or Sunday for the winter, here’s hoping you and — all club members — can make it out to the sanctuary sometime soon to get better acquainted with the place and what we do there.

In the last issue we reported on the fact that Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources had approved our grant requests. Since then a number of club members shared in building an impressive number of new nest boxes for wood ducks/hooded mergansers and kestrels (see picture below) — special thanks to Al Beaulieu for the use of his great workshop, not to mention his woodworking expertise.

Anthony Denton doesn’t much like Canada’s national rodent, but that isn’t stopping him from beavering away in his workshop, building new bluebird boxes. He is determined to get those beautiful birds back to our sanctuary. Let’s hope he succeeds. (For more on this project, see below.)

Now we are upgrading our purple martin housing with a new 24-unit house Ben Mancini bought. The others are quite old and falling apart. That said, one of them attracted a good sized flock of eight or nine pairs and offspring this year.

And we trained some new grasscutters this year, including Ron St. Louis, Al Beaulieu and Churchy, perhaps the first turtle to ever operate a ride-on lawnmower. Al has also been given lessons in operating the Kubota.

But that was then. Now it’s winter and the snowmobiles are ready to go. Every winter we hear about people falling through the ice on rivers and lakes, often on snowmobiles. The Lifesaving Society of Alberta and Northwest Territories posted these guidelines for safety on ice on the Internet:

Don’t be one of the statistics!

The last issue also featured a presentation by Jack Hughes that he gave to our annual meeting last March, but there wasn’t enough space to tell the whole story. For instance, Jack noted that back in the 1960s, around the time the Duck Club was founded, the giant race of Canada geese was thought to be almost extinct. They had been common around the Great Lakes, but were wiped out there in the 1880s. Later, some were found in the mid-west U.S. In the early 1970s, people started moving them back into Ontario, mixing them with local populations of the smaller interior geese. From that modest beginning the geese have succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — he estimates that there are now as many as 10 million Canada geese (and an equal number of snow geese) in North America.

 

Bluebird/tree swallow nest boxes

By Gretchen Denton

In addition to our nest box program for wood ducks and hooded mergansers, the Duck Club also maintains a number of bluebird/tree swallow boxes, and Gretchen Denton and Isabelle Nicol monitor a few of them throughout the nesting season.

It’s been years since we’ve had bluebirds nesting at the sanctuary, but the bird banders at Innes Point see them regularly, so we’ll keep trying to attract them. Gretchen has prepared the following report on the 2006 season:

We monitored 21 boxes from April 17 until August 4. On April 28 there were signs of nestbuilding by tree swallows in eight boxes. By July 21, all activity had stopped and by August 4 we had cleaned out all the boxes. These dates are almost exactly the same as in 2005.

Tree swallow leaving nest box. (Photo by Churchy)

In an effort to encourage bluebirds we have begun pairing boxes — tree swallows will not nest next to other tree swallows but they don’t mind having bluebird neighbours, so one box of a pair is left vacant for potential occupation by bluebirds. Last year we had seven pairs of boxes; this year there were nine. There would have been 10 had a bear not knocked one pair down. There are three single boxes we monitor, and another seven single boxes along the entry road that are not monitored, but were checked once at season’s end. So far, only tree swallows have used the boxes.

Last year, at the end of April we were finding dead swallows inside boxes, the result of a cold spell that hit just after the birds arrived. We also found maggots. (Isabelle particularly hates maggots.) Things were less distressing this year; however, results this year were not nearly as good as last year, despite the many swallows we saw flying around. Was this because of hot weather in July followed by rain and cold in August?

Although statistics about swallows are not needed as part of the club’s work, we find it interesting to monitor them:

There was a six week gap in monitoring, and some boxes were missed some of the times we were there, so of the five probable hatches, we actually saw baby birds in only two of the boxes (five babies in one case, four in the other). In two other boxes we found a dead baby, while in another there had been a lot of activity — swallows flying in and out, sounds inside — before we saw a bird sitting, then later found a used-looking nest.

On August 4, we made our only check of seven of the nine boxes along the road to the clubhouse. Many of them were wet inside. We found:

• 1 unused nest
• 1 unused nest on top of 2 dead birds
• 1 used nest which may have had a successful hatch
• 3 dirty nests with dead, either young or adults
• 1 dirty nest with many small black biting ants. (Gretchen particularly hates those ants.)

In 2005 all of these boxes had had at least a nest and a bird sitting. As a by-product of our work, if bluebirds do arrive one day, we will know which boxes are easiest to monitor. We can rule out the very high ones that are checked by lifting off the top as well as the ones that hinge in front, causing the top to lean in onto the nest, these only give a view of a stack of grass. The best are the ones that open in front, with the hinge at the bottom. Of the mechanisms used to secure the doors, the bent wire you can turn with your fingers is the easiest to open. The red circle painted around the screw to be loosened, in the most recent models, is helpful.

Looking forward to next year we are planning to add a few more pairs of boxes. Following Jim Sauer‘s recommendation, we will put these in the middle of fields, that is, in front and in back of the clubhouse, but not at the edges of the fields, as most of them are now. Jim says that bluebirds don’t like to be near bushes, they want to have a clear view all around them. Let’s hope it works.

 

TAIL FEATHERS

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Churchy with help from the late Deever .

 

The NESTBOX #19, December 2006 (original Word version)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 6:37 pm and is filed under NestBox, Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.