I'm not Canadian, but I have a mallard story that I love to share. I apologize in advance for the length. I will make it as short as I can, but it won’t be easy.
I live in an apartment complex that, at one time, had a large and lovely swimming pool. Sadly, it has since been removed. I had become home to a mallard family that would return every spring to give birth to their young. So, all the residents were quite accustomed to seeing a mother and a number of young ones waddling around the complex all summer.
One soft, warm summer night, long about 11 PM, I heard unusually loud and frantic quacking from the mother. The quacking wasn’t all that unusual, but the length of time it went on was. Finally, I had to go see what was going on.
Just across the street from my townhouse. The mother stood, still quacking and pacing back and forth on the curb. I could hear the little ones peeping but I couldn’t see them. As I walked closer to the mother, I realized the little ones had fallen through a sewer grate into the sewer itself. I later learned a rattling tow truck had slowly cruised past just as mom and kids were crossing the street, and the mother led her little ones across the grate in a hurried attempt to get out of the way.
The sewer was a 3 foot wide round hole that only descended 4 or 5 feet into the ground before making a 90 degree turn and running down the street along the curb. So, I could see several of the babies just below me, but a few had wandered into the tunnel. How many I didn’t know.
I was soon joined by a number of other residents who had been alarmed by the racket mom was making. We first tried to remove the grate, but resurfacing had firmly cemented in it place. We spent a lot of time trying a number of unsuccessful methods of retrieving the babies, including tying a string to each corner of a handkerchief, which gave us a crude net that we lowered into the sewer. This however required the cooperation of the youngsters who would have to waddle onto the handkerchief so we could lift them out. I believe we actually got one of them out with this method. Amazing!
While we were trying our desperate tactics, the mother remained only a few feet away from us pacing back and forth in distress. I was awed by the motherly instinct overcoming her natural fear of humans. At last, she could stand it no longer, and she just flew away.
Finally the offending tow truck came around again and, feeling guilty about his complicity in the tragedy, hooked on to the grate and popped it off. One particularly brave young man dropped down into the sewer and carefully retrieved all the little quackers, which we plopped into a cardboard box.
But now, where was mom? By this time it was one o’clock in the morning and everyone began drifting off to get some sleep. We just left the box on the side of the road expecting, hoping, that the mother would return and tip it over to retrieve her young. I sat on my stoop waiting to see if this happened, but no luck.
Around 2 AM I happened to see the mother fly in and land in the pool, so I grabbed the box and headed over there. I placed the box on the ground not far from the pool, expecting the mother to hear the peeping and come over to get her babies. Mom quacked; the babies peeped. Mom quacked; the babies peeped. Mom quacked; the babies peeped. Nothing happened. It finally dawned on this experienced ornithologist that the kids were hardwired to come to the mother, and not the other way around. So, I gently tipped the box over, and sure enough, the little ones made a beeline for the still quacking mother, peeping loudly all the way. They struggled through about 30 feet of grass, ducked under the chain link fence surrounding the pool, crossed the 10 foot wide cement apron around the pool and plopped into the water right in front of the mother. As long as I live, I will remember the chucker she emitted when those babies hit the pool. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize the whole thing, but I have never heard a sound like that chucker before or since. No one will ever convince me that she wasn’t expressing joy and relief.
It was, far and away, one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. It becomes even stranger when I admit that I was a duck hunter for many years. I don’t hunt anymore.
