Students watch wild wood ducks hatch

These were the first three wood ducks that hatched Friday at Duck Creek Conservation Area. A few lucky Puxico summer school students and others visited watched as biologist Peter Blums checked wood duck boxes for ducklings Friday afternoon. (Photo by Candice Davis)

PHOTO GALLERY: Click this link for more pictures from Duck Creek Conservation Area.

It's not every day that children get to view the hatching of ducklings in the wild. Some lucky Puxico summer school students and others visited Duck Creek Conservation Area (CA) Friday to meet with Waterfowl Biologist Peter Blums as he checked Wood duck boxes on the area.

Blums has studied wood ducks and hooded mergansers on the area since he came to the United States from Latvia in 1993. He estimates he's placed bands on more than 50,000 ducks over his career. Waterfowl bands are placed on ducks and geese to assist biologists in recording movements, longevity, and sources of mortality for North America's migratory birds. The information helps to measure populations, set hunting regulations, restore endangered species and study the effects of environmental contaminants.

A significant aspect of Blums' work at Duck Creek CA is a banding technique that he said he brought with him from Latvia. The technique enables bands to be placed on newborn ducklings.

"Before, wood ducks and hooded mergansers were only banded as adults, because the bands would fall off of the ducklings," Blums said. "This prevented many ducks from being banded, but with this specific technique they can be banded at birth."

The technique Blums uses involves a band with two components, a metal adult sized band and a molding clay insert that wears off gradually over time and eliminates the problems associated with non-adjustable bands.

Blums expected 14 total ducklings to hatch on Friday. He monitors the nesting boxes on the area closely, so he can place the bands on the ducklings within hours from the time that they hatch. They have an incubation period of about a month, he said. Although he routinely can predict hatch time very accurately, he said he doesn't have a specific method.

"I've just been working with wood ducks for so long, that I can look at the egg and I know about how long it will be," he said.

He estimated the hatch time so closely, that students on Friday were able to view the ducklings as they hatched. Since only a few of the ducklings were hatched Friday afternoon, Blums and the group reconvened that evening, when he said the rest of the eggs would be hatched.

Life Sciences teacher, Sally Hancock, of Puxico, said the visit to the area was well worth the effort for her students.

"We talk in our classroom about what biologists do in the field, but to have this opportunity for the students to go in the field themselves, and see a biologist at work is a great opportunity," she said. "It brings a whole new dimension to what we study in the classroom."

For more information about Duck Creek CA, go to http://tinyurl.com/9oqe444. For opportunities to take classrooms outside, go to http://mdc.mo.gov/education.