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Duckling rescue becoming an annual event?

Either the mother duck has a short memory or she’s just plain stubborn.

In any case, for the second straight year, the quacker led her young troop to a drainage ditch on the Headquarters campus, and for the second time, it required year-round residents to intervene.

The returning duck found a secluded spot in landscaping near ITD’s Business & Support Management building. Probably the same place where she set up the nursery last year, guesses grounds foreman Andy Guaydacan.

After patiently tending the nest and waiting for tender bills to emerge from the eggs, the mother duck took her fluffy brood out for a field trip. And like last year, she marched them to a familiar water source for swimming lessons.

While she could easily walk across the protective grate over the storm drain, her trailing ducklings dropped methodically between the bars, landing about three feet below.

So what to do?

She made another distress call to Scott Swanson, who helped bail out the brood last year. That set into motion a rescue effort, led by grounds worker Pancho Cortez. After removing the grate, he carefully plucked each stranded duckling from the bottom and placed it in a cardboard box. Cortez repeated the process five more times, reuniting a half-dozen frightened fur balls.

The mother duck remained a quacking distance away, supervising the rescue and counting each of her offspring as they were plucked from the drain. Swanson took the boxed ducklings – with anxious mother in tow – across the parking lot, through a field of dry grass and weeds, to the banks of the Boise River behind Headquarters where he released them to their mother’s care.

Almost immediately, the mother gathered her brood and swam to freedom in the gentle current.

Will the rescue become an annual event – as predictable as spring rain? Guaydacan, Swanson and Cortez will find out in about 12 months.