After a South Milwaukee resident reported frantic duck activity, a police officer arriving on the scene quickly “quacked” the case.
Officer James Rodman said a resident called police just after 7 a.m., June 30 after they saw a mother duck frantically pacing and quacking loudly.
Rodman soon found four baby ducklings in the catch basin of a sewer on 13th and Manitowoc avenues.
Is saving ducks something that’s taught at the police academy? No. Rodman said it’s a “figure it out as you go” situation.
“There was a lot of trial and error, a fair amount of error,” he said with a laugh.
Police removed the grate and attempted to scoop the ducklings out, but they jumped into a pipe making them impossible to reach.
The solution? Officers began playing duck noises on their phones.
“It kind of worked,” Rodman said, noting the ducks were chirping back but they didn’t come out of the pipe.
One worry was another pipe path led deeper into the sewer system.
“If the ducks got past us, they would’ve gotten into the main sewer and we couldn’t have gotten them,” Rodman said.
Police contacted the South Milwaukee water department which brought a jet truck — essentially a truck with a water pump. Workers started filling a catch basin which slowly directed the ducks to where officers could retrieve them.
The mother duck had been circling in the sky during the rescue efforts which Rodman estimated took about 45 minutes. Soon after the ducks were out and the area cleared of rescuers and onlookers, mom landed, and Rodman reunited her with her four babies.
“It was great to see a positive outcome of it,” Rodman said. “They waddled away.”
Rodman said he’d rescued stray dogs but never anything like this situation.
And there’s proof of the endeavor because his wife, Sarah Rodman, stopped down and took pictures of the pro-duck-tive rescue.
Contact Erik S. Hanley at erik.hanley@jrn.com. Like his Facebook page, The Redheadliner, and follow him on X @Redheadliner.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What are you doing down there? South Milwaukee police officers save ducklings from sewer
Reporting by Erik S. Hanley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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