Ducky Tales

So there we were a couple of days ago just about to go out when I heard a loud honking noise and I went to look. Coming along my neighbour's driveway was an Australian shelduck with four ducklings in tow. She was obviously very distressed and under attack from the resident ravens while a pair of kookaburras were looking on with definite evil intent.

Our neighbours heard the commotion and joined us as we tried to encourage her to find shelter. These ducks often nest quite a distance from water and all would have been well if we could have persuaded her to change direction so she was heading towards Lake Karrinyup which is about a five minute walk away. But she was determinedly heading in quite the wrong direction. There are other watery places in that direction - Star Swamp (misnamed as it it is actually a pretty little lake in a bushland reserve) on the other side of several very busy major roads and Lake Carine, also in bushland and over major roads. Both are about a twenty minute walk from here.

My neighbour tried to contact someone who might be able to catch and release them in a more appropriate place but could find no-one available. So things were looking pretty grim. We had an appointment and had to leave - there were five other people there by now and I figured they would be able to handle the situation and truthfully, however sad it was, I was starting to think it would be more appropriate to let nature take its harsh course.

We were coming home three hours later when we spotted a neighbour who lives five houses down standing by the side of the road staring into their neighbour's garden and stopped to see what was going on. And there was mother duck and now there were only two ducklings being dive-bombed by the ravens and kookaburras. Mother duck was still heading in the worst possible direction towards the busy roads but she suddenly veered off through their open garage. She'd spotted their swimming pool and all three dived in happily bathing. We left our neighbours working out where they could find a large enough net to try to catch them since chlorinated swimming pools do not provide much in the way of sustenance and that was the last we expected to hear of it.

Not so. Yesterday we heard that they had finally managed to catch them and taken them to our local vet when mother duck had one final surprise. Of the two remaining ducklings one was a shelduck but the other ... was not. We had noticed that it was considerably smaller than the others and much darker in colour but how mother duck ended up with it remains a mystery.