Yesterday I got a call from the owner of our local Feed Store (capitalized because that’s actually the name of the store). Since it was 7:00pm on a Sunday evening, I knew something was up. Turns out that a woman in town, Carolyn, had become the unplanned foster parent of 11 mallard ducklings.

The back-story is that there was a momma and her babies trying to cross the road. The momma got scared by the cars and flew away, leaving the ducklings scattering. If you’ve never seen baby ducklings before, they are extremely small and very uncoordinated. A passing man picked them up (to save them from being run over) and–instead of leaving them safely by the road for momma to return to, he packed them in a box and took them to Carolyn.

Carolyn had just raised some chicks, so she had facilities to care for the ducklings overnight, but she lives in town (and is in her 70’s) and didn’t want the ducks.

Long and short of it is that now we have 11 ducklings safely in our baby-duck-and-chick raising pen. As of this evening they were all healthy, warm, and somewhat confused.

We’re hoping that some of them will be females. Turns out that of the 18 or so other ducks we still have living on the pond, only 3 are females. I think the drakes out there would appreciate evening up the score a little!

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