Thanks dirtgirl!
I have all my wood roughed up inside. Mostly I have regular [small] nesting boxes for tree swallows and some others. Have put up one wood duck box last year.
Perhaps you can tell me if my duck box looks OK, or what else I can do to attract them?
All I attracted was a honey bee swarm. This area is not all that great for wood duck, there is some, but not too many.
Do you put some wood chips inside?
Oh..there is a little pond about 30feet from the tree.
Konrad

Dirtgirl:

First: your advice to look over the boxes may be late for your area, but in many parts of the country, they're not even thinking about looking at them yet, if they are back in town at all. Most of the water is still frozen in many areas.

Second: they don't need that hardware cloth at all in a wooden box. It doesn't even need to be "roughed up", as long as it's rough cut nonplaned lumber they'll do just fine getting out. You should see what escape artists they are when raised and brooded in captivity, jumping out of even smooth sided brooders that most ground nesting species would never be able to.

You're probably right,... but it doesn't hurt.
I can climb most trees without a ladder too.....LOL

About 40 years ago in Switzerland, when building a chickadee nesting box in school, we had to carve some little grooves [steps] with a chisel.
Konrad

Well that's true, not everybody reading this is in the same temperate range as myself. Which is good, because then this WILL be a timely reminder that might keep them from repeating my mistakes.

The boxes we have up were built to spec from a booklet put out by the Illinois Dept. of Conservation, and it's possible that the mesh idea just represents their thinking at the time. Can't recall what kind of lumber we used but it wasn't rough-cut but really quite slick. I remember thinking that when we decided to build new ones in a few years, I was going to opt for roughing the surface instead of the mesh...the way it would naturally be.
We do use hardwood chips in the bottoms of ours, something like 4 inches of them if I recall.
I simply go by what I am told when I build a nesting box, so I'm the wrong person to ask for construction pointers. However, your house looks like a well-built box, Konrad, and I think I also recall seeing some wonderful other pics of your handiwork in other threads...owls, maybe? You seem to do excellent work!! Maybe I should give you a call when my current boxes need replacements! Now, whether or not the intended residents will use them is another matter. You say you put your house up last year? It took two or three seasons for the ducks to accept our sites, and I was thinking I had overlooked an important detail somewhere when they finally showed up. The bat house we put up never HAS had any bats in it, and our bluebird boxes in any given year will have either nuthatches, chickadees (weird), wrens, flying squirrels, tree frogs, bluebirds (imagine that) or even totally go unused.
So you may be hoping for ducks and wind up with something completely unexpected, like your bees. I'd be happy to have a hive in one of my boxes, but I would certainly want to put up an additional duck box or two to make up for it. It's all according to what you personally want to do.
Happily I don't have any problems with sparrows or starlings, but all other comers are welcome.

Good luck with your duck efforts...keep me posted if they do show up!