St. Albert emergency services performed a quack-tacular rescue of some ducklings Friday – and may have accidentally broken federal law in the process.
Two RCMP officers and four members of St. Albert Fire Services reunited a female mallard duck with her eight ducklings on the morning of June 5 after the babies had become trapped in a sewer on St. Thomas Street near the roundabout.
Sgt. Dustin Guyda of the St. Albert RCMP said he spotted the ducks in distress while on patrol near the St. Albert Provincial Court.
“I just saw a mama duck in the middle of the road and she wouldn’t move,” he said, adding she was near a sewer grate.
Investigating, Guyda said he soon heard the sounds of chirping coming from the grate, and saw four ducklings when he shone his flashlight down it.
Guyda called St. Albert Fire for backup, and was soon joined by another police officer.
St. Albert Fire Capt. Matt Gordon said he and his crew opened the grate, determined the sewer to be free of lethal gases and sent a man down into the eight-foot-deep hole. The man was able to retrieve one duckling but found the others were beyond his reach, having fled down 20-foot-long pipe the width of an arm.
Crews repositioned at the nearby Grandin Medical Clinic grate, went down, flowed about 10 gallons of water down the pipe, and retrieved the ducklings as they floated out one at a time. RCMP officers relayed each bird to the waiting mother, who swiftly led her charges into the cover of a nearby forest.
Gordon said the department typically responds to about one wildlife rescue call a year and has retrieved ducks from sewers before.
“It’s a happy call,” he said of the rescue, and it was a good morale booster at the station.
Technically illegal?
Gordon said the officials involved with this rescue had not been trained by WILDNorth Wildlife Rescue and did not call them before retrieving the ducks.
That means they may have broken the law, said Dale Gienow, executive director of WILDNorth, northern Alberta’s wildlife rescue group.
Ducklings and mallards are governed by the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act. If you want to legally rescue them, you need to have a specific permit or be trained or supervised by someone who has such a permit. The only groups around Edmonton with such a permit are WILDNorth, Alberta Fish and Wildlife, and the Canadian Wildlife Service.
The penalties for violating the Migratory Bird Act start at $5,000 for an individual and $100,000 for a city, Gienow said. But the act is almost never enforced for rescue situations like this one, and people illegally rescue ducklings all the time.
Gienow said people who spot baby birds who are clearly in danger should call either Fish and Wildlife or WILDNorth for assistance. A duck leading its babies across a busy street doesn’t count, he noted – ducks and geese do this all the time, and know what they’re doing. Only if the birds are somehow trapped are people authorized to swoop in for a rescue.
Gienow said WILDNorth typically gets about 20 calls about ducklings in sewers a year and sometimes calls in fire or Epcor officials to help. Goslings on roofs are even more common. Rescued ducklings are either returned to their parents or raised by humans, as ducks tend not to adopt orphans.
Residents should never go into a sewer themselves, Gordon added.
“Small catch-basins can easily become lethal,” he said, and may contain dangerous gases.
The rescued ducks were unavailable for comment.
Residents who spot wildlife in distress should call WILDNorth at 780-914-4118.
