eptivity

Just when you thought Stephan couldn’t get any more awesome, he goes and saves a tiny little baby bitesize duckling!

We had a bit of bread to feed the ducks on our canal walk yesterday, but we couldn’t find very many, so we had to walk farther than we usually do, down to the lock that looks like this:

At the top of lock , there is a drain off to one side so the canal water has someplace to go when the the lock is full—the water is tunneled under that grassy bit off to the right there, and empties back into the canal at the bottom of the lock.

So there we were, minding our own business, when we noticed there was a stupid swan doing his stupid mustachioed-villain thing. I normally don’t get too worried (anymore) because he’s usually just being a jerk to other birds who could fly off if they really wanted to.

But as we got closer, it became apparent that he was traumatizing a mother duck and her tiny little baby bitesize duckling, who had somehow ended up in the slopey bit between the canal and the lock drain.

I don’t know if you know this, but traditionally all of the “unmarked mute swans in open water” in the country belong to Her Majesty the Queen, and it is a major offense to injure, kill, or disturb the breeding habits of one. Plus, they’re a little bit scary just because they’re so big (and have been rumored to “break the arm[s] of full-grown men”), so there was nothing we could do to physically dissuade the swan.

Stephan hopped down into the slopey bit between the ducks and the drain, but the duck was sure that Stephan was more of a threat than the swan that was snapping at her and her baby, so after a minute or two, she panicked and hopped out of the canal altogether, leaving her tiny little bitesize baby alone between two equally terrifying menaces.

I distracted the swan, mostly with taunts regarding how my down coat was packed full of swan feathers (how would he know?), long enough that the duckling scooted over to the other side of the slopey bit.

Where he promptly lost his footing in the deeper water and was swept toward the drain!

Whereupon, Stephan caught him just before he went through the grate!

And popped him up on the bank with his mum.

I continued taunting the swan, and the ducks waddled off toward the end of the lock, where apparently three more ducklings and the father duck had been waiting the whole time. And it was only when the entire family was reunited that the mother duck stopped her incessant alarm quacking.

A happy ending was had by all!

Especially when, after all of this, the mother duck tried to get her babies down to the canal below the lock by taking them BASE jumping off a 3- to 15-foot wall (she tried the 15-foot part herself first, but they weren’t having it, so she convinced them to try it off the other, shorter end—it was still pretty entertaining to watch four little fluffballs launch themselves into the air, only to collapse in heaps at the bottom).

So anyway, that was a really long story that could probably be better summarized in this artist’s representation of the events:

[I do apologize for the egregious inaccuracy in the representation of the mother duck, who was, in fact, a mallard.]