Wood Ducks move right in on the Ipswich River

Wood duck pair in our backyard on the Ipswich River

In the spring of 2012 our family put up a wood duck box in our backyard along the Ipswich River, about a mile upriver from downtown Ipswich. While we had noticed one or two wood ducks the previous fall right after we moved here, putting up the box was mostly a whim to amuse our two toddlers.  And, although it fit in with our native landscape makeover we were doing to attract wildlife and slow run off to the river, we never thought ducks would actually use it. It's literally twenty feet from our tire swing, sand box, slide and (new this spring) life-sized replica of a bald eagle nest the kids built.

Our not-always-quiet backyard and its wood duck box

Last spring, while we did see a few ducks displaying in our trees, we didn't get our hopes up. And then, on Mother's Day, I saw a hen go in the box. We watched for two hours until she emerged and immediately ordered a tiny infrared camera to go in the box. DuckTV was born.

Mama Wood Duck checking for predators before going out for a snack, April 2014

My girls, then aged two and four, watched DuckTV every morning while 'Mama Duck', as they call her, spent a half hour to two hours laying an egg, then rejoin her mate on the river for the rest of the day. After laying eight eggs, one a day, she started incubating until they hatched on June 16th. Sadly we were on vacation and missed the whole thing. A neighbor, who happily checked DuckTV for us, reported six of the eight eggs hatched. The next morning the hen flew out of the box, called to her chicks, and they all jumped and followed her down to the river.  Wood duck chicks have been known to jump from heights up to 290 feet unharmed!

Wood duck drake waiting...

This year we eagerly awaited the return of the ducks as hens will use the same box or tree cavity until they die. Sure enough, on March 11th of this year we heard the first wood duck fly past our house. And this year, instead of just a few ducks, our back yard seems to be overrun with them! One morning there were five pairs in one tree! It wasn't long until a hen plopped into our box on the morning of March 22nd.  She checked it out for about an hour with her mate waiting nearby.

Mama Duck's 13 eggs in a nest of down pulled from her own body

 One week later she laid her first egg, and by April 11th she was done, having laid a whopping thirteen! Wood duck hens will cover their eggs with down pulled from their own bodies and then go out to feed two or three times a day, allowing us to climb up there to count the eggs and therefore estimate hatch date.



Wood duck hens incubate between 28 to 32 days, so hatch date could be as early as May 8th. And we will most definitely be home this year. There's no way we'll miss Jump Day again! While we don't have our camera linked to the web (working on it) we can capture video. Click here to see a video of the hen burying her eggs before she went out to feed.

Wood ducks are not endangered, although due to habitat loss suitable nest cavities are becoming more scare. We still haven't figured out why they love our backyard so much when they could nest in the five acres of woodland across the river, but we've put up two more boxes just in case.

Wood ducks will nest up to a mile away from water and clearly are not spooked by human activity once they establish a nest.  For information about putting up your own wood duck box, including plans to build one, visit the MA State wood duck web page.

92,160 square inches of roof + 46.83 inches of rain = I'm gonna need a bigger rain garden!

Male fern, Dryopteris filix-mas, in the mini rain garden

This past week I was invited to present my Slow the Flow native garden project and storm run-off solutions to a Boston University class on urban water issues. And, as college students usually do, they asked me a lot of really good questions. The one that stumped me and made me head straight home to find a calculator was, "How many gallons of rainwater runs off your roof and into your mini rain garden?" 

Wow. I had no idea, all I know is in a heavy rain it fills up the rain garden.

There actually is a very simple calculation to figure this out. It's so easy it didn't even make me cringe in my usual manner when I have to tackle a math word problem. You can even try this a home!

My rear roof is about 32' x 20'. The gutter slopes towards the rain garden side of the house, so I can assume almost all the water goes down that one down spout. After the massive downpour on August 10th that caused my mini rain garden to flood in this picture (right) my rain gauge had 2" of rain in it. Now comes the math to figure out how many gallons actually did fill that rain garden:

• Take the dimensions of the roof and convert them to inches. So my 32' x 20' roof is 384" x 240" or 92,160 square inches. 
• Multiply the roof dimensions by the amount of rain fall in inches. For the August 10th storm that's 92,160 x 2" = 184,320.
• Divide by 231 (1 gallon = 231 cubic inches) = 798 gallons fell on my back roof and flowed into the mini rain garden on August 10th (give or take a bit, my rain gauge probably isn't that accurate).

According to NOAA's climate data website Massachusetts received 46.83 inches of rain in the 12 months since we purchased our house. As anyone living in Ipswich knows we often vary greatly from the rest of the state but I will use this number as an estimate. If I redo the math for the last 12 months a whopping 18,683 gallons of water flowed down that one corner downspout and, until I built the rain garden in August, straight into the Ipswich river and out to sea not recharging the watershed at all. It was basically wasted water.

I'll have to add up the whole roof and find out how much rain water could be captured in rain gardens, or even better, a cistern for later use in the garden. With this math in hand you can imagine how productive a single rain barrel can be when placed properly. My two rain barrels only ran dry once this summer. It really doesn't take much rain to fill them.

As cute as the mini rain garden is it clearly needs to be much larger to capture the heavy rain we often get. Since I built the mini rain garden in August we've had two storms heavy enough to fill it, and it's only been two months.

Our long-term plan is to reposition the back gutter to slant towards the still unlandscaped other side of the backyard (left). You can see that the downspout extension hose drains to a very large sloped area. This is just begging to be terraced into a series of rain gardens.

But that is a project for next summer. I think it's time I put away my gardening gloves for the season and enjoy the view of the river.

0.3 acres, ancient yew shrubs, a lot of buried plastic and the PIE Slow the Flow Grant

This past October my husband and I realized a dream of buying a riverfront home. Our little 0.30 acres (see right) of Ipswich, MA sits alongside the often lazy Ipswich River, which meanders its way from its headwaters in Burlington and Wilmington, MA all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, spilling out its flow just north of Crane Beach into the Plum Island Estuary (PIE). PIE drains a 600 square kilometer area and is part of the larger Great Marsh, the largest continuous salt marsh in New England.

A very large part of this estuary is protected by the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge and local land trust. But that can't protect everything that goes into the rivers and streams that feed the wildlife refuge and salt marshes (i.e fertilizers, pesticides, and petroleum runoff). Parker River NWR announced this spring a grant program to "give impetus and incentive to property owners within the Plum Island Sound watershed to implement organic green landscaping projects in order to improve water quality and quantity of the Plum Island Estuary." They dubbed the grant "Slow the Flow".

The Ipswich River Watershed Association posted info about this grant a week before my husband and I were to appear before the Ipswich Conservation Commission to present an application to remove the old yew shrubs, relandscape with natives, and more importantly remove the 2500 square feet of plastic sheeting that I discovered the former owner's landscaper had laid down years before under about six inches of mulch to prevent weeds. It's now poking out in many places ( see left).

Being right next to the river and having plastic cover most of your yard is not a good thing. We want the watershed to hold onto runoff, not have it all dump into the river and go out to sea.  Large paved surfaces in more developed towns upstream are adding to the major flooding Ipswich has experienced in recent years. The sooner I could rip out that impervious plastic the better I would feel about myself and our owning this property.

The Conservation Commission easily granted us permission for the shrub removal, addition of a native wildlife garden (where there is otherwise just bare mulch), a vegetable garden, shrinking the lawn and installing a safety fence in a small area of the backyard so my two very young children didn't end up in the river. The next day I immediately started digging. If you can imagine my goal of native cottage and woodland gardens, with colorful perennials and ferns, and you look below to see what I had to start with you can see why I started digging right away. My vision is pretty much the antithesis of this picture.

Even with Conservation's approval in hand I thought it would be a long shot to get this grant. It could mean a matching award towards all the ferns, jack-in-the-pulpits, foam flowers, cardinal flowers, fothergillas and blueberries I had been dreaming about all winter. In the four months we had owned the house we had spent a lot of money on insulation (it had almost none) and other energy upgrades which were a priority, not leaving much in my dream garden budget. The grant would allow more of all these plants and larger specimens too. Instead of planting over four or five years I could afford to fill in the bare areas this year. I attended the workshop in March, listened to many great lectures on research going on in PIE that I wasn't aware about, and native gardening tips that I were aware about but was happy to hear again. I sent my application in on April 18th and crossed my fingers.

In the meantime my husband ripped out all the yews (as much as I despise destroying any plant, I couldn't find a home for the yews and they sadly ended up at the local leaf dump). For a few weeks it looked like a tornado hit the house. I made many promises to neighbors that "it will look better some day, I promise!" As the new green color went on the clapboard, the doors were redressed in a bright blue and the stucco lightened I think the neighbors began to believe me. And while awaiting word on the Slow the Flow grant I kept busy filling in the otherwise empty and desert-like strip of mulch along the road (foreground to the left), and the now-empty space by the front door, with blanket flowers, liatris, black eyed susans, columbines, coneflowers, ferns, and day lilies I started in my greenhouse - and a pussy willow my three-year-old picked out at a local nursery.

On rainy days my girls helped me make mosaic bird baths that are to become focal points in each of the garden areas. Although I keep finding their plastic toy lizards in them, they're also very good at making sure the bird baths are supplied with water from the two rainbarrels I just installed. I have had eleven neighbors stop to tell me just this week that "WOW, what a difference!" or ask "May I come back and write down what these plants are?"

And then I came home last Thursday night to an email stating I got the grant! I could not have been more thrilled. Some women indulge themselves buying shoes, or jewelery or clothes. I buy plants. You can never have too many books or flowers I always say. So this weekend's plan is to hit the local nurseries and next week's plan is a trip with my older daughter to Garden in the Woods, home of the New England Wildflower Society and the mecca of native woodland plants.

A big thank you to the team at Parker River NWR for awarding me this grant and beginning what I know is going to be a rewarding and beautiful journey for our family and our new home. I will post pics every week on my progress and look forward to sharing the results.