A Massachusetts State Trooper helped reunite a mother with her ducklings over the holiday weekend. Trooper Jim Maloney came across eight baby ducks who had fallen through the grate of a storm drain in a parking lot in Nahant Beach.
The ducklings’ mother and one of their siblings — the only baby who had not fallen through the grate — were standing off at a short distance, because the mother would not leave her trapped babies.
Trooper Maloney called the Department of Conservation and Recreation and asked them to send someone with a crowbar. Eventually workers from DCR, Nahant’s Department of Public Works, and Lynn Animal Control arrived on scene.
The incident occurred at approximately 9:20 a.m. on Sunday morning when Massachusetts State Trooper Jim Maloney was on patrol and happened to discover eight baby ducklings stuck in the bottom of a storm drain — with the mother duck and the only offspring who didn’t fall through lingering nearby — after they somehow separated from the family and fall through a grate in the parking lot of Nahant Beach, northeast of Boston.
Nahant DPW pried open the grate, and the Lynn Animal Control Officer fished the ducklings out the drain with a net. Moments later, the mother emerged from the brush and the babies were placed at the edge of the grass. The mother immediately went to them, and together she and her nine babies — the family fully reunited — walked back into the grass. “By this time their mother had moved into a grassy area near the drain to wait. The ducklings were placed in a cardboard box and Trooper Maloney put the box in his cruiser, with the heat on, to wait for the mother duck to come out of the brush to take her babies back.”
“It’s a State Trooper’s most fundamental mission: to help others in a time of crisis and danger. Sometimes those in danger can not speak for themselves. And sometimes they are a different species,” said the Massachusetts State Police. “A small act amid the enormity of the ongoing health crisis, perhaps, but for one mother duck and her tiny babies, it made all the difference in the world.”
