Make Way For Ducklings

I spent a good deal of yesterday wallowing in anaerobic mud. The wife and I were visiting a marsh near our house when a trio of tiny ducklings lumbered out of the weeds and headed straight for us, letting out shrill little calls. As always, I reacted swiftly and surely; to turn dead white, shriek like a child, and teeter on the edge of syncope was, for me, the work of seconds. Fortunately, my wife was able to calm me down with the injectible valium she carries for just such emergencies.

It was obvious to my wife - who works as a wildlife nurse and rehabilitator - that these birds were lost or abandoned, and that their prognosis was extremely poor. She caught two, and I caught the other. We took them down to the water's edge and let them loose on the mudflats, and they immediately set off to join the nearest family. It may not have been the ducklings' biological family, but they were in no mood to be picky. While ducklings are precocious feeders, swimmers, and divers, they need a mother to protect them from hypothermia and predators, and to waterproof their feathers.

While we were carrying the birds, a passerby warned us that "the mother will reject them" because we'd touched them. That's a myth. Mothers don't care if ducklings have been handled by humans (they have a very poor sense of smell); and in many cases, they'll "adopt" the abandoned offspring of other parents, an interesting phenomenon known as "post-hatch brood amalgamation."

Within a few minutes, the mother had herded her brood out of the water - our foundlings included - and was warming them up on the shore.

Having done our good deed for the day, we wanted to get on with our walk. We went about fifty feet before we heard another duckling's distress call. This one was paddling in circles in a narrow canal surrounded by mud and pickleweed. To make a long - and messy - story short, we eventually caught it. After drying and warming it, we put it in a well-populated pool. It tried to attach itself to a number of couples, who outswam it or flew away. Things were looking pretty bleak, but it finally followed a female ruddy duck who led it to a mallard family, which it joined without incident.

Another passerby hinted that we were interfering with the Laws of Nature, which had mandated that these particular ducklings should be food for predators. There are a number of reasons why this was a silly objection; the main one is that it may still happen. In this marsh, egrets, kites, gopher snakes, and other predators abound, and these ducklings have a dangerous few weeks ahead of them.

But more to the point, you really can't romanticize the impersonal workings of nature in an essentially manmade ecosystem, where hatchlings face a galaxy of threats from humans, chemicals, fishing line, plastic bags, pets, and introduced or invasive species, in addition to their natural predators. A level of reproduction that's sufficient to keep a population stable in normal circumstances may not do the trick when new development, for instance, increases the threats to a species' survival.

We only traveled ten more feet before we came across two more lost ducklings. We tried for about ten minutes to catch them. I sank up to my calves in foul-smelling muck more than once. In the end, all we managed to do was separate and terrify them. They finally either hid themselves very well, or - more likely - drowned. Needless to say, we wished we'd left them alone, and went home feeling depressed and stupid.

So despite morally pure intentions and a considerable amount of expertise, our efforts apparently ended in catastrophic failure one-third of the time. Or is the fate of the last two ducklings "acceptable," since they would almost certainly have died of hypothermia or been eaten by predators regardless? Did we save four from "certain" death, or did we kill two through our blundering? Or was it a little of both?

Questions like these - trivial as they may seem when applied to the rescue of abandoned ducklings - are pertinent to far more serious undertakings. When your mistakes are counted in lives, precisely how many should you be allowed to make?