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On the 11th I went
in for surgery to have my gall bladder removed. They kept me in
the hospital one night, and then for one or two days after that,
I was sore and sleepy and spent most of the time in bed. By the
time the 15th came around, I was at least awake most of the time
and sitting up at my computer for some of it.
As I was sitting there,
I heard some duck racket from the courtyard through my window.
A few minutes after, I decided to go out to see what the fuss
had been about, if it was still visible.
I didn't see any reason
for the ducks to have been all agitated, but I did hear an insistent
chirp coming from somewhere nearby. I went barefoot down the stairs
to the courtyard to see where the chirp was coming from. I eventually
located it in the sunken patio closest to the bottom of the stairs.
Further investigation revealed that the intermittent chirping
was coming from a baby Mallard; probably from one of the nests
that Mallards constructed in the courtyard this year. Here he
is, to the left of a cement stair.
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| He was trying
to get up the stair; he jumped at it several times and was almost
making it up, but not quite. He was trapped on the patio, and was
looking pretty exhausted. First I thought of scaring him up the
stairs, hoping the fear would add to his vertical leap. But when
I approached the patio, he went running to the back corner, so that
didn't quite work. |
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I thought about catching
him and then putting him in the pond, but I wasn't sure if his
mom would accept him back if he smelled like me. Mom wasn't anywhere
nearby; she had either given up on the little tyke (who I named
Huey, for obvious reasons) or wasn't aware of his distress. I
was pretty sure that that was her up on the green bank of the
lagoon.
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My next plan was to
build a ramp, and I went and got couple of pieces of wood to try
this. My first piece was quite wide but too short, and it wouldn't
have been easy to set it up on, say, the upper half of the stairs
after getting the little guy up the lower half. The other piece
was long enough (to reach from patio to ground level) but was
only a few centimeters wide. I placed it but wasn't able to get
him up on it; he ran around it.
Plan three eventually
hit me; since Huey could jump most of the way up a stair, if I
just made the stairs shorter he would have no problem. So I went
back in and found three plastic boxes and placed them to make
the three big stairs into six small ones.
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That's the abortive
thin ramp going across the top of the photo.
Now I herded Huey over.
Here he is on the first stair. He didn't yet get the idea, and
I had to shoo him a little more before he jumped further up.
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| But after
that shooing, he got the idea, and started jumping up the stairs
himself. Here he's jumping from the fifth stair to ground level.
The cement beside the stairs goes a little higher than ground level,
but from where he lands on this jump, it's a straight run forward
to the lagoon. |
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| And that's
precisely what he did; he waddled at lightspeed across the walkway
and the next photo I got had him already in the water. |
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| He continued
on out, swimming towards some adult drakes, just as a shower was
starting. |
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| Eventually
Huey caught sight of Mom on the shore and veered over towards her. |
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| Here he's
clambering up the rock, and that's the last photo I got of him before
he snuggled up under his mom. |
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| Mom's got
her poker face on, but I'm sure little Huey was a happy and relieved
little duckling to be back under her wing. |
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In that last photo,
you can see that the rain has really started coming down. At this
point I went back inside; I left the stairs there for another
week or so in case he got trapped again.
Barefoot and a little
wet, but on the
mend,
Tom
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