IT’S the time of year when little balls of fluff, Wood Duck ducklings (or more accurately ‘goslings’ as Wood Ducks are geese), start wandering around on roads with their parents. Sometimes this can go terribly wrong, and in some cases human intervention can make everything right again. The great Yea duckling rescue took place near Yea FoodWorks on Wednesday, September 16. Steve Joblin was driving along High Street in Yea and spotted two ducks standing on top of a concrete culvert. He thought, “That's strange. They started walking in front of traffic. I thought they are not going to last too long.” He pulled up in front of the supermarket and went over to see what was going on. He thought that the parent ducks might be calling their ducklings out of a tree, which he had seen ducks do before. “The mother, as soon as I got out and went near where the ducklings were, she fluffed herself up and came at me like a barking dog,” he said. “I thought there's got to be ducklings here somewhere. Then I could hear them. Where the hell [is the sound] coming from? I thought they've got to be around here somewhere. I can't see them, but I can hear them. Then she [the mother duck] went and looked down a crack in the concrete and was looking at them. Oh, there they are.” Steve thinks that the ducklings must have gone into a culvert and down the pipe from the other side of the road. The parents had been trying to call the ducklings out, but of course they couldn’t get out. They had parked their car, slightly off the road with the hazard lights on, so other drivers would slow down. Steve hoped that this might help protect the parent ducks, who were becoming agitated. Steve said, “Most people were really good. Some people slowed down and asked what's going on what's going on. I said, well there's baby ducks in there.” Some suggested council or the local vet, but by that stage, Steve had already gone to the vet and asked Nolene at the Yea Vet to call council for a rapid response. Returning to the site, Steve saw that someone had turned up in the carpark, a member of the public but not someone he knew. The man suggested that they try to lift the concrete cover on the drain, and together they were able to achieve this. The parent ducks had flown off by this stage, as they were being harassed by magpies. The two men got into the big box drain, which was about a foot and a half down to the ducklings. There was no way that the ducklings would have been able to get out by themselves. Steve had to lie on his belly, holding the concrete drain cover, while getting the ducklings out. Steve said that the other man stepped into the drain to try to stop the ducklings moving along one of the smaller drains. Steve said that if they had gone along one of the drains, “I don't know where they would have gone. They might actually gone down to the Yea River through the drain pipe, I don't know.” One by one they were able to get the 12 ducklings out and pop them onto the lawn and the parent ducks soon returned. The ducklings rushed straight to the mother duck. Steve said, “Once we'd got the cover back on and got them all out, they wanted to cross the road. They wanted to go down past the police station… I just herded them down the road like herding sheep. There was one straggler three or four feet behind the parents, but the parents closed up on them pretty quick. “They knew where they were going and they went into the car park of the Yea Wetlands. Because of the recent rain there's still a pool of water there, and they went straight in the water. They were good because they can't fly, they're little things, so they just stayed really close behind mum and dad and then into the water, happy as Larry.” Steve estimated that the ducklings were only just out of the nest in a hollow tree somewhere, in the last 12 to 24 hours. They were tiny, “just little fluffballs.” Steve said of the concrete drain cover that it was a bit out of place, with a two or three inch gap. The movement likely caused by people parking on the lawn in the centre strip on High Street. Although the location has now been made duckling-safe through the concrete drain cover placement, Steve suspects that the ducklings entered the culvert on the barbershop side of the road, potentially avoiding a predator, then they have moved down the drainpipe under the under the grass verge in the centre of the road and then got to somewhere with the parents over top and they didn't know how to get out or where to go next.” As mentioned, magpies were swooping the parent ducks, so this may have been the initial cause for the ducklings to duck for cover. Curiously, the magpies were focused purely on the ducks and didn’t mind the rescuers being there. It was likely that the magpies had a nest nearby. Steve also commented on shoppers who were giving the rescuers the thumbs up and saying ‘that’s great’ and similar. He said, “A few people would have seen me herding them down with my arms out saying, come on, come on.” These were the first duckling that Steve has seen this season. We are coming into the time when people are likely to see ducklings on the roads, so keep an eye out and allow them time to cross. While the ducks and ducklings were making their way towards the Wetlands, Steve said they didn’t need to call the police as most of the drivers were behaving responsibly when they realised something was going on. Unfortunately, Steve was too busy locating, rescuing and herding the ducklings to take any photos beyond the one with this story. He thought afterwards he should have taken a video of the ducks waddling off down the road, but knew that he was too busy at the time. People say herding cats is hard, but as Steve said, “Herding ducks is worse.”
