Wild Webbed Waterfowl, Batman! It's a Duck Emergency!

The mens were playing with gadgets this morning and I went off to pick some rhubarb down at the community garden in order to make a pie for a picnic we were going to in the afternoon.

When I got to the end of the block I came upon three women converged around the storm sewer drain in the street. They were surrounded by a variety of strange objects: a bamboo cane with packing tape wrapped around the handle; a cat's paw; a couple of kitchen knives; a cardboard box with a screen on top of it and a mother Mallard duck that was quacking her head off.

I knew one of the women, Anna, who lives nearby. She quickly explained that the duck family had apparently been walking along the gutter when they crossed the drain and the little ducklings had dropped, one after the other, through the grate and into the sewer.

Now, we've had a lot of rain this spring, but luckily the storm sewer was dry. The women had managed to get two of the ducklings out of the sewer and into the box by putting the bamboo cane down the hole and pressing the ducklings against the side of the sewer pipe and sticking the ducklings to the tape. These were tiny ducklings and the ones that were still in the sewer were hopping up and down trying to get back to the family, but their little wings were nothing but nubbins.

One of the women was doing a valiant job of trying to keep the mother duck from being run over as she circled the sewer drain, but she wasn't having much luck corraling her. The next idea was to try and pry the lid off of the sewer drain in order to afford better access to the victims.

I ran home and asked Ted if he wanted to get involved and while he showed his usual ambivalence about it, Louis was certainly interested so Ted let go of his free time and came down to the corner with me. I brought some corn meal along, just in case.

When we got back to the scene, the little ducklings had had enough of the circus above them and had started walking into the sewer pipe and could no longer be seen. By the time I walked the half block to the garden to get a shovel to try and pry the lid off, another couple of people had joined the effort; the shovel failed to pry off the lid.

In one of those synergistic moments that are barely to be believed, a Roto-Rooter guy pulled up to a nearby house and came over to see what we were all up to. Turns out that he had a long crow bar and the muscles to use it and he had the lid off the sewer in three seconds flat.

We lowered Louis into the sewer, which he promptly declared "smelled like Hanoi" and using a flashlight he was able to determine that there were three more ducklings and that they were about six feet down the pipe.

Roto-Rooter guy then proceeded to take the lids off of three more manholes in the intersection (by now Mr. Mallard had joined the sqwaking and the traffic had been successfully tamed, healthy dog treats had been brought along with a bucket of water to the dog whose owner had discovered the plight on their daily walk and Thành had nearly fallen into the sewer a number of times and had been removed from the scene, which lead to great distress on his part) and a small woman got down into one and the R-R guy hung upside down in another and between the three of them they were able to make enough noise/motion to drive the ducklings toward the fourth hole, where they were scooped up and put in the box with their siblings.

After all of the excitement was over, the ducks were returned to their parents who led them straight to their nest between two houses on our block. We suspect that this is the same pair that has nested on our block for years and probably the male is the mallard that was making such a racket on the top of Mookie's house a few weeks ago.

As everyone was dispersing Anna told me with a certain disgust in her voice that when they had initially called Animal Control the fellow on the line had told her that they didn't come out for wildlife and that these "were just ducks".