Building 50 duck incident, May 14th

This morning coming to work I happened to see a momma duck walking across the parking lot outside building 50 with her 8 babies in tow.  They walked over a drainage grate, and all 8 baby ducks disappear through the cracks and got trapped in the drain:

Frantic momma ran around trying to find her babies!

Brent brought a garbage can out from building 50, and facilities helped scoop them out.

Out came 7 baby ducks that we managed to herd back to Momma:

There was one problem though – baby #8 crawled down the pipe and wouldn’t budge.  Meanwhile freaked out momma duck was taking off with her 7 other babies. 

Rescue methodologies included:

• Trying to lure baby out of pipe with duck-call app downloaded to iphone.  Unsuccessful but it did allow us to pinpoint which pipe he was in due to his loud peeping.
• Flushing water down a different drain to try and push him out of the pipe.
• Going head first into ditch with flashlight to try and grab him.
• Sticking a piece of pvc pipe into the hole.
• Flushing even larger amount of water down pipe and catching baby in a net. (ultimately successful)

After 2.5 hours of being trapped in a pipe, baby Scout was placed snug and safe in a cardboard box.

Since there was little chance of finding momma again after so long, I took him to a local vet where he will get picked up by Sarvey wildlife center (they take donations on the website, btw!).   He will grow up at their facility in Arlington with some other baby duck friends and then be released back into the wild (i.e. the suburbs).

And yes, keeping him occurred to me but Greg has cut me off from adopting more pets . 

Thanks to Danny & Brent, and facilities who all helped with the rescue.  I am so happy that little Scout had a happy ending after all he went through this morning!