| In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors. |
Tahoe duck waits patiently for ducklings' rescue
Friday June 20, 2003SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) The trek across U.S. 50 was going fine for a mallard and her seven ducklings, with cars stopping on the busy, four-lane highway to let them cross. But while the mother easily hopped across a drain grate to the curb, her offspring fell through the grate.
Bryan Unruh, an El Dorado County animal control officer summoned to the scene Thursday, saw the ducklings were paddling around in the drain and grabbed a net to scoop them up so they could be reunited with their mother, who was on a nearby lawn calling for them.
But the ducklings swam up the drain pipe, out of reach.
``They're smart,'' said Henry Brzezinski, chief animal control officer who joined Unruh in the rescue effort.
Firefighters from the South Lake Tahoe Fire Department showed up next, opened a grating a couple hundred yards away, and used a fire hose to flush the ducklings toward Unruh and his net.
``Eventually they got tired of swimming upstream,'' Unruh said. ``They came out in bunches: the first one had five, the other two.''
The ducklings were put in a cage, and Brzezinski picked it up and headed for Lake Tahoe, a block away. The mother mallard marched behind, quacking all the way to the water's edge, where the ducklings were turned loose.
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