1994: Wood Ducks, Then More and More Wood Ducks

         I had my pond dug in the fall of 1993.  The main reason for doing it was to create some wildlife habitat.  The pond filled with water over the winter and by the following spring, I was starting to see that Nature was beginning to take advantage of the new environment I had created for them.  The biggest surprise I got in 1994 was the arrival of wood ducks, a species I had never seen before in the Valley.  That spring they had discovered the oats that my goats had dropped in the bedding of the barn that I had spread along the pond’s dam, to encourage grass growth, and were happy to eat the grain. 

    That spring the number of wood ducks on my newly created pond slowly increased as they migrated into the Valley, but the most I saw were ten.   Then over the summer they disappeared, flying off to nest.  As autumn slowly began, I got a real surprise:

    We got back home from our prairie vacation on August 21st.  There were two wood duck on the pond, which was a pleasant surprise, because there had been no wood ducks on the pond since spring.  The hummingbirds had  disappeared, traveling south on their migration, and the days had gotten noticeably shorter, at 9:00 in the evening it was dark, which prompted me to record in my diary:  “Summer is already losing its grip.”  When we woke up two days later, there was fresh snow on the mountains.

    As the days passed, I started to notice that wood ducks, who had been absent from the pond over the summer, had started to arrive in increasing numbers.  One morning there were 7, that evening there was 9.  On August 25th I counted 13.  I assumed that many of those I was seeing were the mother ducks with their adolescent ducklings.  The wood ducks were no longer sporting their colorful plumage and were brownish in color.  I expected that the males had lost their distinctive coloration because the breeding season was over.

    On the morning of August 26th, I didn’t see any wood ducks, and figured that maybe I should put some more grain on the dam for them to eat.  I filled an old coffee can with oats and walked it down to the pond.

     SWOOSH, a flock of wood ducks I hadn’t seen, flew up from the other side of the pond.  I tried to count them as they flew off and got to roughly twenty-three.  I counted the same number of wood ducks again that evening.

    Diary, August 30th:   “ This is crazy, there were 30 wood ducks this morning.  I counted 26 this evening, but it was getting dark.”  

        As days passed, I continued to count 30 wood ducks regularly, even into the first week of September, when I counted 34.  On September 9th I had an amazing 39 wood ducks on the pond, but surprisingly, that number was surpassed two days later when I counted 42 of them.  After that, the flock of wood ducks started to slowly decline, as they began to migrate out of the Valley.

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