Skyline students study duck boxes at Hazel Wolf wetlands
September 20, 2011
By Christopher Huber
As William Lam climbed up the ladder, he and his Skyline classmates watched for spiders dangling from and nestled in the wooden duck box attached to the tree.
Once over the fear of what might be crawling on him, he searched and felt around the box to open it up. He was looking for the remains of a nest inside, where either a wood duck or a merganser would have laid eggs or hatchlings would have fledged last spring.
Sammamish resident Ted Burris, left, of Ducks Unlimited, explains to Skyline students what they will be doing with the duck boxes Sept. 15 at Hazel Wolf Wetlands. Photo by Christopher Huber
Lam and his fellow IB biology and IB environmental systems students spent their after-school hours Sept. 15 doing maintenance for an ongoing research project on 13 duck boxes fastened to trees around the Hazel Wolf Wetlands in Sammamish. Group members extracted now-abandoned nests to later observe and dissect at a Skyline biology club meeting, said research project organizers. They also added new materials for the next duck nesting season and stapled more camouflaging material to the outside of a box, if necessary.
“In biology club, we’ll go through ‘em CSI-style,” said Ted Burris, a project leader with Ducks Unlimited, as he explained the plan to students at the trailhead along Windsor Drive Southeast.
The goal of the duck-box project is to better understand the nesting habits of area wood ducks, said Joelle Nelson, Skyline IB environmental systems teacher. Some of the factors the students are researching include: why many clutches don’t hatch, whether temperature plays a role in nest success and garnering more details about nest dumping.
“Mostly we’ve found that they don’t hatch and there’s lots of nest dumping by mergansers,” Nelson said. “We’re really trying to find out about nest dumping and trying to find a solution to that.”
Nest dumping happens when, for example, a mother wood duck lays eggs, flies off, and later returns to a nest full of hers and, say, a merganser’s eggs. She then abandons the nest and none of the eggs hatch. Nelson said the students will work to figure out how to attract wood ducks to and deter mergansers from the duck boxes. Factors that may help include placing a nest (duck box) farther from a trail or closer to the water, or positioning it in full-shade areas.
The Skyline students recovered numerous nests with un-hatched eggs, but that also had hatched chicks that never made it out of the nest.
“It gives me some chance to work outside the classroom,” said Skyline senior Sophia Long. She said this was her fourth time doing the wetlands project and first time helping extract the nests. Since she would like to someday do field work as a scientist, this is a practical way to learn basic, but real-life research methods.
“It’s accessible and I get to learn a lot while doing it,” she said.
In the past year, project organizers placed four cameras aimed at different boxes around the wetlands area, said Gretel von Bargen, Skyline’s IB Biology teacher. It gives them a new view on the environment surrounding the nests — bears climbing up to the nests, other birds hindering safe nesting, etc. The students voluntarily sign up for the work project four to five times per school year, the teachers said. Once back at school, they will record data, observing things like the type of eggs in the nest, presence of down feathers and egg shards (evidence that eggs hatched), if there are multiple species of eggs (evidence of nest dumping), etc. Eventually, the science students will combine their data with other data from Burris at Ducks Unlimited to help determine the success of each duck box.
“Whenever they can see they can make a difference and see an application for what they’re learning, it makes them want to help,” said von Bargen.
Reporter Christopher Huber can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 242, or chuber@isspress.com.
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