I just had a beautiful & amazing experience! As I pulled into the Walgreens parking lot at the corner of Kirby Whitten & Stage in my home town Bartlett, TN, I saw a woman had stopped traffic on Stage Road to help a momma duck & her 14 babies finish crossing the road. So I went to help the babies get up the curb & once they got across the sidewalk, they all huddled under a bush. There was nowhere for them to go in the direction they were headed without crossing parking lots & more busy streets. I couldn’t let them die. By then several people stopped to help. So we got a box, put the babies in it & tried to coax the mom to join them. But instead she flew back across Stage Rd & over the Auto Zone building. I remembered there was a pond behind there, & that’s probably where they were coming from originally. So I put the box with the babies in my vehicle & swiftly drove over to the pond. Just when I got to the pond & set the box down to let the babies out, the mom flew away heading back toward the spot where we found them. The babies were all huddled on the ground beside the box, so I just knelt down & made a space under my knees where they could feel safe (pictured here). One of the ladies who had been helping came over & said the mom was still sitting by the bush at Walgreens. So she took the box back to see if she could get the mom to get in the box, while I sat by myself with the other babies on the bank of the pond. After about 30 minutes, another family of ducks came strolling along the bank. So I took all the babies down to the bank to see if they would join the others. But by the time I got them all into the water, the other momma chased them away & now the babies were all huddled by themselves in the middle of the pond. So I jumped in my car & drove back to Walgreens to see if I could find the mom. She was still sitting in the same spot by the bush, so I got out & tried to capture her with a blanket but she took flight. I chased her halfway across Stage & saw that she was heading back to the pond. So I jumped in the car & when I got back to the pond, there was the momma & her 14 babies safely together again!!! A momma & her ducklings live to see another day!
