Neighbors help momma duck get her babies to river
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff Writer
And the little peeps shall lead them.
A woman walking her dog Monday afternoon found herself involved in the rescue of nine ducklings on Edward Street in Burlington – ducklings that were dropped 30 feet from a nest in the tree to the ground below.
Thanks to the effort of a handful of people, the mother duck and her nine ducklings were taken to the Fox River and set free.
Around noon on Monday, Karlie Thate took her dog outside. And in a moment, she heard quacking around the corner.
“And it was just quack, quack, quack, quack, quack,” relayed Thate.
Not involved in her first duckling rescue of the year – she and a neighbor each found a single duckling in their yard earlier this spring – Thate was quick to find the baby quackers. Then another neighbor came out, and said he had seen the babies falling out of a tree.
“(The mother duck) pushed them out of the nest and they fell,” said Thate. Apparently, the wood duck had decided to nest in a tree near the road, where city employees had cut branches near a power line and created a large vacant spot in the tree.
When Thate called Fellow Mortals wildlife rehab center for advice, she was told to get all the babies rounded up, and then get the mom.
That was easier said than done, because by the time they started rounding up the ducklings, class had let out down the street at Karcher Middle School.
Still, Thate and her neighbors – which included 18-year-old Callie Tuchel, who’d just gotten home from Burlington High School – started catching the ducklings and placing them in a box.
Tuchel found one that took an odd liking to her hair.
“It wanted to crawl up there and go to sleep,” said Tuchel. But eventually, all nine ducklings were corralled in a box, and Thate, along with Tuchel, two other children and Sueann Ederhofer, decided to see if the mom would follow the peeps of her children.
Eventually, after walking about a block, Mama Duck started following along. So began a procession that took the group down Robert Street to Pine – where the duck narrowly avoided being run over – and then to the Fox River via the dog park.
Once at the dog park, a friendly dog on a walk decided to bark at the mother duck – which took off in the air over the heads of her would-be rescuers, and landed in the bushes by the river.
From there, it was a simple matter of releasing the ducklings in the water, and watching them swim to her.
“She was still quacking for her babies,” Thate said. “We went to the edge of the water, and put them in, and they swam over to their mother.”
It certainly wasn’t how Tuchel expected to spend the afternoon – the first of her final week of high school.
“I came home to find my mom and my neighbor dealing with it outside,” Tuchel said. “I just thought I was going to be working on a sociology paper.”
And yet, she got a chance to watch everything work out.
“Watching them fall was the scariest,” Tuchel said. “I just wanted to reach out and catch them. But they were perfectly fine, all nine of them.”
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