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Species Spot - Bed and Box?

Lisa Woo Shanks was tired of dealing with horse poop but it was poop - and the flies that come with it - that led to her latest, more elegant project. While trying to help ranchers reduce flies in an environmentally-friendly way, Shanks, with the Bay Area Council of Resource Conservation Districts, came up with the idea of installing nest boxes to attract bug-eating birds. Instead of the more common garden variety bug-eaters like bluebirds, swallows and ash-throated flycatchers, she settled on wood ducks, whom she heard about from ornithologist Rich Stallcup. Not only do the ducks favor nest boxes for shelter and bugs for fodder, they also offered, in Shanks' view, an ideal way to involve landowners in watershed stewardship: "It's okay to like ducks," she explains.

Wood ducks had been hunted almost to extinction by the early 1900s, and their nesting habitat - mature riparian trees old enough to have cavities - disappeared as it was cleared for agriculture. Although wood ducks were a candidate for listing as a state Species of Special Concern as late as the 1980s, their numbers are recovering, with help from the many nest box projects around the state, including the volunteer-based California Wood Duck Program sponsored by the California Waterfowl Association, which has hatched over 145,000 ducklings since 1991. As they fly along waterways, wood ducks will spot and readily adopt nest boxes that are placed facing creeks and rivers. Within just 24 hours of hatching, the young ducklings flutter to the ground - sometimes from as high as 50 feet - and follow their mothers to water.

To make the boxes, Shanks got financial help from Ducks Unlimited and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and woodworking expertise from Davidson Middle School in San Rafael. Fifty boxes have since been built by Peter Roodhuyzen's eighth-grade advanced woodworking class. The boxes sport a 4-inch diameter hole just large enough for the ducks to squeeze in and out of, and scratched facades so help the clawed ducklings get a grip on the way out. The boxes will soon to be installed along Sonoma Creek and the Petaluma River, with help from ranchers, farmers, grape growers and the local Resource Conservation District.

At first the woodworking students weren't too happy about having to give away their class projects, since they usually keep their jewelry boxes, toys, bowls, and other craft, says Roodhuyzen. But ultimately they felt a sense of satisfaction in doing something to help the environment, he says, and after a presentation by a naturalist, "really got into the bird itself and leaned about something most of them knew nothing about before."

Contact: Lisa Woo Shanks (707) 794-8692, ext.121

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