Employees at Buttermilk Kitchen in Camden realized something was wrong Monday morning when a duck kept waddling back and forth across the crosswalk in front of the downtown restaurant amid the busy traffic of the school drop-off hour.
A customer who had gone outside to check on her dog was the first to notice the duck’s erratic behavior. The bird appeared flustered as she paced between two nearby storm drains.
The duck seemed unwilling to leave and could be heard quacking loudly above the sound of traffic, as if trying to alert the humans. When Brandon Muggy, Buttermilk’s general manager, poked his head outside, he immediately suspected she was looking for her ducklings.
“She wouldn’t fly away. She just kept coming back to the drain,” Muggy said. “Sure enough, when we got closer, we could hear the little peeping.”
Witnesses said a passerby, a neighbor named Antonio, accompanied by his dog Stella, realized what had happened as he passed and returned a few minutes later with supplies.
Tearing off his boots and socks — but leaving on his feathered felt hat — he lowered himself into the storm drain, taking a bucket and a rope with him. He retrieved the ducklings one by one — five in all.
Meanwhile, the cafe called the town, and soon a public works crew arrived. A Camden police officer directed traffic and kept the mother duck safe.
Onlookers worried more ducklings might have fallen through the storm drain grate. But the rescuers could no longer hear any peeping below.
At one point, Muggy said, a man drove back through town to check on the ducklings.
“He was taking his kids to school and his son saw them fall in,” Muggy explained.
Unable to stop at the time, the father returned to see whether the ducklings had made it out safely. His son wanted to know. Muggy was happy to say they had.
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.