City workers help a mom get her ducks in a row

Neighborhoods with ponds are no stranger to ducks and other wildlife wandering around, but one Eden Prairie resident, who preferred to remain anonymous, found it unusual when she saw a mother duck and only two ducklings walking around her yard on July 7. 

When she noticed there were only two ducklings with the mother, the woman went to investigate and found four other ducklings had fallen into a storm drain. She called the Eden Prairie non-emergency phone number to get help retrieving the ducklings. 

After shining her flashlight into the drain, she saw there were four ducklings stuck and trying to jump and escape, she said in an email to Eden Prairie Local News. When law enforcement came to retrieve the ducklings, a fifth duckling was found further down the drain. 

“I’ve seen mama ducks with their babies go through our yard several times each year, heading down toward the Minnesota River marshes. A duck with only two babies is what caught my attention,” the resident said in an email. “Then she was calling and kept coming back toward the drain, so I figured some babies might have fallen in and couldn’t get out.” 

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Dmitry Ivanov, a community service officer who came to help, said he received the call about the ducklings in the drain shortly after arriving for his shift. It’s not unusual for ducklings to end up in a drain, but this time they were in someone’s yard instead of along the street, and that is less common. 

When Ivanov arrived, he saw the mother duck and two ducklings wandering around the yard calling for the babies. He looked in the drain and saw the rest of the brood trying to escape.  

“It wasn’t a very deep sewer; it was maybe 20 inches deep,” Ivanov said. “They were kind of jumping up onto this ledge in the sewer trying to get out. They were just a few inches from getting out, but the grate was stopping them.”

Ivanov said he was able to reach his arm into the drain and remove one of the ducklings, but was unable to get the rest. 

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An animal control officer and Jeffrey Campbell, a utility maintenance operator, arrived with a few tools and a net but weren’t able to get the little ducks out. 

So Campbell, whose usual tasks involve maintaining the city’s drinking water, wastewater and storm water systems, removed the grate.  

Sometimes, as Campbell put it, the service calls can be a bit “unorthodox.”

With the grate out of the way, Ivanov and others at the scene were able to scoop the five ducklings into the net one by one, Ivanov said, and they checked the drain with a mirror to ensure they’d gotten all the ducklings. 

There was a small hole in the net, so some of the ducklings got loose and were running around the yard, Ivanov said. But after a bit of duck herding, the ducklings were reunited with their mom.

“The mom looked pretty happy,” Ivanov said. “She was kind of rounding them all up.”

If you encounter animals in a storm drain, Ivanov said to call 911 or Eden Prairie’s non-emergency line for help.