A hard day: three duckling rescues

Yesterday I planned a full day of reading and writing for a project I’m working on, but was interrupted three times for duckling rescues, so in terms of “professional” work, I got nothing done. In terms of waterfowl work, I—with the help of others—did rescue eight stranded ducklings who would otherwise have died.  I suppose that’s a fair trade-off, but I really hope these rescues end: they do save lives, but they’re hard on the mother ducks, the ducklings, and on me.  Here are the three rescues.

RESCUE 1.  Around 11 a.m. I saw on the PondCam that a person was standing in the “wildlife area” where nobody is supposed to be. I wandered down to the Pond and found a young man staring fixedly at a spot in the pond—and there was a young (1-3 days old) duckling, paddling along by itself.

The guy, whose name was Arjun Dhar, told me he had found it wandering in the quad and had put it in the pond, hoping that some female would adopt it. Well, that’s a nice thought, but it wouldn’t work for any number of reasons, one being that there were no hens with babies in the pond.  Arjun said that now he wanted to rescue it and take it home to raise. That, too, involves formidable difficulties, and it would be better to take it to rehab. I told him to wait there, keep her eye on the baby, and I’d be right back.

I quickly returned with two nets and a “duck box”, a small box lined with soft paper towels in which to sequester rescues.  It was not that hard to net the baby, and I drove Arjun with me to the rehab volunteer, who lives nearby. Here’s Arajun, showing off the duckling after we scooped it out of the pond. He himself had worked at Lincoln Park Zoo and kept a huge collection of reptiles in his home, including a monitor lizard and a python. I hope to see this fellow animal lover around the pond.

I cuddled it for a second before taking it to rehab:

Fortuitously, there were two other volunteers at the rehabber’s house—the very two who captured Vashti’s babies a few days before—making a run to Willowbrook with a load of injured or orphaned wildlife. The rehab woman put the duckling in a paper back and off it went.  The car was also carrying a bald eagle, who had been in a tree the night before when, during the fierce storms over Chicago, the tree was struck by lightning. The eagle was not in good shape and apparently had a wound in the eye. When I asked the drivers if it would survive, they said they didn’t know. Here’s the poor thing:

RESCUE 2, around 12:30.  Right when I returned from the rehab woman, I saw a knot of people around the channel in the Pond, looking at a narrow spot between two rows of rocks by the drain. In that channel was another orphan duckling, and so I had to get my net and procure it, too, with the help of a member of our Department who sometimes helps Team Duck.  This duckling was diving each time I went for it, surfacing at some random locality.  I knew I could get it if it stayed in the narrow gap between the rocks, and when it dived I gently swept the ground under the water. Sure enough, I came up with a thoroughly wet and thoroughly muddy duckling.  I took it up to my office, dried it off, put it on my chest to warm up, and then put it in another small duck box that I placed next to a space heater. The poor thing was traumatized and not too vigorous, and I was afraid it would die.  But it didn’t.  Here it is on my desk and then on my chest:

I am dishevelled and unshaven; the duck business takes a lot out of you. You can see it’s still wet, but it dried quickly with paper towels and heat (hypothermia is a danger):

When I was catching that duckling, a lady told me that there was an entire brood wandering around the Quad with its mom. I said that I couldn’t go roaming the entire Quad trying to find it, as I was harried. But eventually someone contacted me about it, which led to the next rescue.  Before I recount that one, I have a theory, which is mine.  Rescue #1 probably involved a duckling fron the Quad brood, as the woman who put it in the pond found it there. And rescue #2 may well have been the leftover duckling from Vashti’s brood. I was told that they had recovered seven, for seven had hatched, but I found out when I met the rehabbers earlier that they missed one and got only six. The wet, muddy duckling was, I suspect, the one that was left behind.

On to. . .

Rescue 3. I was settled in my office with the duckling in a box at my feet, getting plenty warm from the space heater. I wss about to get to work when suddenly I got an email from a grad student, time-stamped 2:09 pm.:

Dear Dr. Coyne,

No phone number was given, so I emailed Jenks to call me, which he did immediately. This time there was a whole brood far from water.  The choices were to herd them to Botany Pond, where they’d be driven out by the aggressive drake still here, or capture the entire family for removal to a rehab facility or a distant pond.  I had never captured a hen before, so I equipped myself with two nets and two duck boxes, with a big one for mom. I knew that there was little chance of catching the hen, but I also knew that if left alone, the whole brood would die. I decided to do what I could to capture the family; and if I couldn’t get mom, I’d take the babies to rehab.

I went over to Cobb Hall and met Jenks and his girlfriend Niyati, who was keeping watch on the brood. You can see them below: mom and six babies, walking around in the bushes. The mother had a very slight limp, but she waddled like all ducks, and Jenks mistook some of that waddling for limping.

I watched them for a while, and decided to get the babies, who were peeping, and put them in a box, knowing that mom would stay near the peeping and hoping I could catch her with my big net:

Photo by Jenks and Niyati (I cropped it).

Two very short videos taken by Jenks Hehmeyer and Niyati Jain, who both turned out to be biology grad students. Lovely and helpful people.

The mother did go near the box, which I put in an interior corner of the building to make capturing her easier. I have to admit that I had no idea how to handle a full-grown hen, but a CBCM (Chicago Bird Collision Monitor) volunteer told me to put it in a big box and cover it with a towel.  I had a big box but no towel.

At any rate, capturing the mother was futile.  I would think I had her cornered, and she’d fly straight up and around me.  I must have tried four or five times, and each time the mother would get more freaked out and wouldn’t come too close to the box.  It wss hot, the ducklings in the box were peeping (the mother pecked my leg from behind when I was gathering them), so I decided to take them to rehab, too. The stress-out orphan was still in my office by the space heater, and, returning to the lab to add the singleton to the six, I was delighted to see that that duckling had perked up, had pooped, was peeping, and was much more vigorous. They were on their way to rehab:

Here is the box o’ ducklings from rescue #3 before I added the one from the second rescue to the batch. They were all in good shape and very vigorous.

So that was the last rescue. I made a final foray around the Pond to see if there were any ducklings left behind (the motto of Team Duck is “no duckling left behind”), and then drove the box of seven back to the rehab lady who lives nearby.

After that I washed off my nets and tidied up, and then, too tired to finish the Hili dialogues, I drove home. (I almost always walk home, but had the car because I had gone shopping the day before.. That made driving the babies to the rescue liaison lady much easier.)

The upshot, again: three rescues, eight babies caught. I do hope they do well at the rehab facility, which I think is the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center. I’m told the survivorship of orphaned ducklings there is over 90%—much higher than the survivorship of any of these ducklings, which would be zero.

I should be happy about this but I was psychologically debilitated. I am not a resilient person and always tend to look on the dark side, so the quacking of the bereft mother, the peeping of the babies, and the stress involved in trying to net orphan ducklings in the pond had taken its toll. I’m not asking for pity, but only recounting that three rescues in one day is stressful and fatiguing, aeven when those these three rescues were, physically, a piece of cake.

I went home, lay down on my bed and sometime later wandered to the kitchen to get dinner.  This morning I wandered down to the Pond again, fearful I’d find another orphan. There weren’t any, but there was the aggressive drake, whose wife, I think, is the second hen who produced a brood in the pond—a brood that disappeared on the same day it came down.  She flew down to the pond from the windowsill when I was feeding the drake, so I suspect that she, like Vashti, is re-nesting.  If so, that could be good, as the only ducks in the pond now are her aggressive drake and herself, so there’s nobody to go after a new brood. (Fingers crossed!)

Perhaps we’ll have a viable brood of ducklings after all.  If that is the case, we can expect to see it around July 10.  That’s still a good time for ducklings as it takes them only eight weeks to get to the fledging stage. Stay tuned!