THE AUDUBON BULLETIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
Pale NOs ALU DD UsB.O.N) Si0.C LET Y 
2001 NorTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
Number 39 September, 1941 
Large Nest Boxes: A New Aid in the 
Restoration Program 
By Ropert E. HESSELSCHWERDT 
Illinois State Natural History Survey 
EVERYONE HAS heard of house wrens, purple martins, and bluebirds using 
man-made boxes for nesting, and most everyone has made small houses and 
put them up for these little birds; but the idea of building such boxes and 
putting them up in trees for ducks to nest in is something new. Yet it is 
now a fact that every summer hundreds of mother wood ducks lay their 
eggs and hatch them in specially designed boxes placed in trees along the 
bottom lands of the Illinois River valley. The use of these boxes by wood 
ducks is a behavior just as normal as that of the house wrens nesting in 
wren houses. Under natural conditions the wood duck has always nested in 
hollow limbs and other cavities in the trees. Since so many natural cavities 
have been forever lost, why shouldn’t these ducks readily accept man-made 
cavities designed to imitate their natural ones? 
A few years ago, Mr. Gill Gigstead, who was stationed at the Chau- 
tauqua Waterfowl Refuge at Havana, Illinois, designed some wood duck 
nesting boxes and installed them in trees in areas where he knew wood ducks 
nested each year. Needless to say, the boxes were a success. Since that time 
Mr. Gigstead’s boxes have been modified. Many new designs were built and 
are still being built. 
By spring of 1940 over 1,000 of these boxes had been installed along the 
Illinois River by game technicians of the Illinois State Natural History 
Survey. Also in 1940 as many as 275 of the boxes contained wood duck 
nests. ; 
It was during that same season that the first complete motion pictures 
were made showing how a mother wood duck gets her young brood down 
from her lofty nest which is usually 20 to 30 feet above the ground. It was 
my pleasure to do this photographing in color, and the total 35 hours I spent 
in my blind were among the most exciting that I have ever experienced. 
I watched four broods of little ducklings come down, and the procedure was 
generally the same each time as follows: When the mother duck was ready 
to bring her brood to the ground, she didn’t carry them down on her back 
nor in her bill. She simply made sure that the ground was free of natural 
enemies below and then she perched on a nearby limb and called them out. 
The call was a soft, low whistle audible for a distance of at least 50 feet. 
Usually the ducklings responded immediately and soon appeared in the 
entrance singly and in twos. Without much hesitation they jumped out and 
L1] 
