4 THE AUDUBON BU L Di Heiign 
Some Fortunate Ducklings 
AS PART of the program at the meeting of the Society which was held in 
Quincy last spring we were shown a series of nest boxes that had been 
placed to attract prothonotary warblers. A request to Dr. T. E. Musselman 
for information as to the results brought the following, which, while not 
reporting on the warblers, we think you will find equally interesting. 
“T can bring together a preliminary report of my prothonotary warbler 
experiment, but as yet I do not have enough information to write a finished 
article on what I have found. I have been so busy this fall with my college 
work and lectures that I have not done much with my banding and have 
been unable to do as much field work as I should like. 
“One of the highlights of the season was the rearing of a family of 
young wood ducks. One Sunday, a fisherman brought me three tiny duck- 
lings that were just out of the egg and all of them were cold and stiff. The 
man asked me for an identification and I told him they were baby wood 
ducks. The mother evidently had reared them in a hole seventy feet above 
the ground in one of the park trees, and in taking her babies down to the 
river these three fell into a mud puddle and apparently were dead. I 
heated water and began washing the mud and dirt off the little fellows, and 
as the warmth returned to their bodies they were soon as active as ducklings 
could be. The mother wood duck must have been careless as other fishermen 
brought in more baby birds and at the end of the day I had a total of about 
« dozen. 
“Nowhere had I seen published an article on the technique of raising 
wood ducks, so I had to use my own good judgment. I know that wild 
ducklings live largely upon insects for the first four to six weeks of their 
life. Getting enough bugs, moths, and beetles to feed my little brood was 
a task which I solved by buying an electric bug exterminator. This I hung 
on the outside of my house at night with a partially filled bucket of water 
below it. All the crawly things that were exterminated by the electric 
current fell into the bucket. 
“The following morning I took my little family of hungry babies down 
to a curved drinking trough and after pouring in my bountiful supply of 
insects, I released the family of youngsters. Certainly they knew exactly 
what to do. They dove, they splashed, they grabbed the food and thoroughly 
enjoyed themselves. After a half-hour of feeding and play they began to 
be saturated with water, so I took them out and returned them to a box 
with a heater until they dried off. Three times that day I fed them in this 
way. However, just before I put them to bed at night, I force fed them 
with tiny duck pellets which I secured from the Schultz-Boujon Milling 
Company at Beardstown. 
“IT am afraid the first night they were not sufficiently warm as I lost 
one little bird. The next day they did very well. However, the next night 
I removed a brooding bantam hen and put her in a high box which I covered 
with wire. The babies snuggled under her and were plenty warm, but in 
the morning I found she was pecking at them. I removed them and again 
their daily routine of feeding was as it had been the day before. The next 
