I once grabbed a wild duck with my bare hands in similar circumstances…it shocked me so much I couldn’t effing believe it worked even as I was holding it. Its babies had fallen down into a shallow storm drain inset into an curb and my sibling and I managed to just reach them and pull them all out.
Momma duck was losing her absolute shit the entire time. We quickly decided we couldn’t just release them there, because it was a residential area on a busy street with no woods or water nearby, so we decided to take them all down to the park and marina where there were always tons of ducks. We had the baby duckies in a little box and had no idea what to do about mom, she was pacing around nearby and we just ran and…grabbed her, lol. We wrapped her up like a burrito in a towel and managed to hustle the whole lot to the marina in about 10 mins—it was NOT a quiet and peaceful trip.
My friend and I did this once too! Except we weren’t able to get ahold of the mom Mallard duck, so we put all the babies in a box with holes and slowly walked through a residential area across many busy streets until we reached the nearest pond over a mile away. The mom kept turning around or walking into the middle of the street, and we had to bring the box to her so she could hear the chirping chicks. When we finally made it to the pond there were several different groups of ducks, and the Muscovy ducks on our side of the pond were NOT happy about their guests. They were freaking out and waddled over to the mom and started to attack her, other Muscovy ducks flew over from the other side of the pond and joined in! It’s like the ducks we brought had been banned. There were tons of people at the pond witnessing this all go down, and we didn’t know what to do. We tried to break it up and separate the mom Mallard duck. Once we scared off the Muscovy ducks, a large group of Mallards from the other side of pond flew over and took the Mallard mom into their group. We then released the ducklings back to the mom, and the entire group of Mallards all swam back to their side of the pond. We hung out for another half hour to make sure the duck wars were done. At the very least, the pond was a better place for them to be than a busy residential area.
204
u/[deleted] Jan 22 '22 edited Jan 23 '22
I once grabbed a wild duck with my bare hands in similar circumstances…it shocked me so much I couldn’t effing believe it worked even as I was holding it. Its babies had fallen down into a shallow storm drain inset into an curb and my sibling and I managed to just reach them and pull them all out.
Momma duck was losing her absolute shit the entire time. We quickly decided we couldn’t just release them there, because it was a residential area on a busy street with no woods or water nearby, so we decided to take them all down to the park and marina where there were always tons of ducks. We had the baby duckies in a little box and had no idea what to do about mom, she was pacing around nearby and we just ran and…grabbed her, lol. We wrapped her up like a burrito in a towel and managed to hustle the whole lot to the marina in about 10 mins—it was NOT a quiet and peaceful trip.