Lovely story - baby ducks

[smallonion]

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...MPLATE=DEFAULT

[TooLover]

What an awesome story. In this day and age with so much violence it is so reassuring to know that there are some out there with hearts and compassion!

[angie]

Awwww,I just love hearing stories like that and hearing that people help
out animals that are helpless...

[blueroseaviary]

Hooooo Raaaaayyy!!! All the ducklings are safe!

[jessicaboyer89]

I have a baby duck story. I'll try to keep it short.

I moved to California recently, but last spring I lived in Traverse City, Michigan. I worked for an insurance company that was on Grand Traverse Bay. There is alot of wildlife in that area and I spent my lunch breaks at the park next door watching all the ducks and geese raise their families. The geese were especially cute! Well, one day my fiance and I walked out the front door of the office and there was a mother duck and a few babies walking around the front parking lot. This was very strange because the only access to this parking lot was from the road. It was a parking garage, so there was parking underneath and no way for little babies to fly up from the ground below. We knew it was very unlikely that they came from the road. As we looked around to try and figure the situation out, a duckling dropped from the sky!! We looked up and the mother had built her nest about 18 feet above the pavement on a ledge! And, to our horror, the babies were jumping off!! I quickly sent my fiance in to find a latter and I went over to the baby who just jumped. Sad to say, it did not land ok. I wouldn't have picked it up, but I knew there was no way it was going to survive. I scooped the baby up and cuddled it in my hand. It was so precious. I immediatly feel in love. Well, as I was checking out the baby and before my husband got a latter, another one jumped. This one landed ok, though. Wow, was I relieved about that. It waddled over and joined the mother. Well, finally, Nistha (my fiance) found a latter, some gloves, and a box. He climbed up and tried his hardest to catch the baby chicks (not easy!). All this time, I was trying to keep the mother and chicks out of harms way in a corner. After Nistha got all of the chicks he could find he climbed down and reunited them with the mother. (Boy, was she nervous!) Well, Nistha didn't find all of the chicks. One peaked over the edge and was about to jump. Fortunatly, Nistha caught it in the box!! Just to be safe Nistha went back up and found no more babies. But there was still another challange. We had to get the family down to the water!! Believe me, it is not easy to get a mother and a dozen babies to do what you want. We ended up having to corner them and force them into going down two flights of stairs!!! Then we lead them to the water and one baby after another jumped off of a five foot ledge into the water. They quacked and dunked themselves and the whole group swam away. We were so happy! If they had tried this on their own they all would have surely died. Trying to jump from the top parking deck to the grass would NOT have worked! We were feeling pretty happy with ourselves. Nistha took the latter back in and we decided to drive the injured baby to the nearest vet. They were so kind! They put the baby in the incubator awaiting ex-rays. They said they would call me and let me know if there was any chance of it surviving. I was so in love with this baby, but I didn't have any hope that it would survive. They ended up calling the next day. It broke several bones so they had to put it to sleep with a little gas. They said it seemed happy in the incubator, though. Well, the story isn't over. When Nistha drove me back to get my car, to my absolute horror, there was another baby chick underneath my car!!!! And the mother already swam away. :oops: Boy, did I start crying. Well, I scooped this one up and we took him to the vet too! After a few calls were made, they found an agency that rehabilatated sick/injured/orphand wild birds and reintroduced them to the wild that was willing to take the chick. So...everyting turned out ok. I still get sad when I think about the little chick that didn't make it, though! Everytime it heard it's mother it let out a little quack.

p.s. There are probably many spelling errors, ect. I'm at work and had to keep the story short and quick! Sorry!