“Huh. You don’t see this every day,” Caroline Hoard wrote in an early March Facebook post.
Her son told her they had ducks in their pool, and Hoard thought he was kidding until she found a male and female mallard getting along swimmingly in her Lakewood Hills backyard.
She hoped they were just passing through. When she approached them, they flew onto her roof. But they returned the next day.
“I loooove animals, but my pool can’t be the best place for them to rear their young,” Hoard wrote.
Friends commented with tales of finding baby rattlesnakes or frogs in their pools. Others made references to “The Sopranos.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJ8pBoZXCg]“This is the fourth ‘ducks in pool’ post I’ve seen today. Must be courting season,” someone else commented.
A week later, Hoard provided an update: “The ducks officially live in our backyard now. They are here 24/7 it seems like. I suspect baby ducks will be hatched at some point. The kids are thrilled. While I simply worry about their health (chlorinated pool) and I wish they would use the potty somewhere else.”
Then, a month later, she found the nest with 11 eggs.
“After finding an egg at the bottom of our pool, I got suspicious. Looked around. And yep. That duck made a nest,” Hoard wrote. “I thought she was gone. Apparently she was living in the bushes next to the pool. She’s a stealthy duck. Like a ninja.”
The responses ranged from recipes for duck a l’Orange to suggestions of rescue and relocation groups. She called a few — “Don’t worry, I won’t murder ducklings,” she assured the concerned — and Hoard and her daughter even built a ramp up their pool steps so the future ducklings, if they couldn’t yet swim, could crawl out without drowning.
“I guess this means my pool is out of commission for awhile. Sigh,” she wrote.
They joined a local pool and waited for the eggs to hatch. And then, this morning, “They’ve arrived! Nine ducklings. We are registered here,” she quipped. Two of the eggs somehow were damaged early on and weren’t viable, she says.
She expected they would stick around another couple of weeks until they were big enough to fly. But almost as soon as the ducklings and their mama took a dip, they left the Hoards’ yard and started waddling toward the lake.
Hoard found out when a friend tagged her in a post in the Lakewood, Dallas Facebook group calling for help. The ducks had reached the White Rock YMCA, not far from the Hoards’ home, and the mother was trying to lead the babies across the four lanes of Gaston during rush hour traffic. A mother and daughter saw what was happening and loaded the ducklings into a clear tub. This made the mother duck frantic, but she wouldn’t climb in.
“Call the police,” Hoard commented in the group post. “Have traffic stopped for a moment on Gaston. Don’t let the mama lose sight of the babies for even a minute. Heading down now.”
It’s not the first time this week that a duck crossing has stopped traffic. It happened Monday on Garland Road, too.
On Gaston this morning, five adults halted the cars as they all crossed the street, the mother duck closely following behind the woman carrying her babies.
They continued down the trail toward Winsted. As they approached, Hoard asked some construction folks to turn off their equipment as they paraded by.
“They did and were so sweet,” Hoard says.
Once they reached Tokalon Park, the woman carrying the crate set them down sideways so the ducklings could climb out. The rescue party watched them follow their mama through the field and disappear as they made their way toward the lake.
“They’re fine. Happy. Healthy. And following mama to the water. #lakewoodteamwork,” Hoard updated the Facebook group.
“Sad they only stayed so short a time once born,” Hoard wrote, “but super glad to have our pool back!”
