By Cheryl Jahn

SCWA has a new housing project

Oct 20, 2023 | 3:36 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Jesi Lauzon and a host of volunteers have been busy lately building duck nesting boxes like this one and hen houses and a project called Help Us Help Ducks.

“So this is our pilot. This is our first year. So we started putting up sign-up sheets on our tables throughout the year. Anywhere that we’ve had a table, we’ve had a sign up sheet as well of reaching out to people on our social media.”

The Spruce City Wildlife Association is predominantly known for its work around salmon rearing and habitat, but that’s not its only focus. It’s wildlife in general. And they were looking for a project. Alas! Help us Help ducks.

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“We came across an organization in the States that does this, and what they’ll do is they’ll build the boxes and the houses and they just look for people who have property on wetlands roads or know that there’s ducks in the area, that sort of thing,” explains Dustin Snyder with the Wildlife Association. “And they’ll give them the boxes, they’ll install them for them, they’ll give them the hand hoses and just kind of put them out there, and then they send a group of volunteers out to maintain them once a year, clean them out, see if they’ve been getting used and that sort of thing.”

Ducks, wood ducks or otherwise, are not an endangered species by any stretch. But they are susceptible.

“A lot of ducks nest on the ground and when they’re nesting on the ground, it’s really easy predation, pretty much anything walking along can pick off the little ones or pick off the eggs or even something like, you know, a moose walking through the wetland can step on the nest. So there’s a lot of predation on those very early stages and cavity-nesting ducks again to they need that old growth, they need those big rotten trees standing by a wetland or a river, that sort of thing, in order to nest at all or to find a suitable spot for a nest.”

In fact, according to the Spruce City Wildlife Association, having manmade housing increases, the successful survival rates of up to 80%. So a nesting box will go up and it won’t be for cavity-nesting ducks such as wood ducks and mergansers. So we’ll actually fill it about a third full with straw and then the ducks will come in. We’re installing in the winter because the ducks will be using them in the spring,” says Lauzon. “So this way it has the whole season to get rid of any of the unnatural smells.”

Cottonwood Island Park, which sees ducks all year round, is the destination for one of the nests, as is the Hudson’s Bay Nature Park.