Ducklings : Spot-billed ducks

Encounter with ducklings

July 15, 2014
This is Pyeongchang, South Korea.
It was four years before the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
My younger sister received a vacation coupon from her company. Since the company’s private golf resort was located in Pyeongchang, our entire family came for a two-day, one-night vacation.
There was an electric golf cart in the garage, and since neither my sister nor I had ever driven one before, we decided to take a drive around the resort.
After driving around for about 20 minutes,
we heard a sound that sounded like a chick’s cry coming from somewhere.
We stopped the cart and looked around to see where the sound was coming from. Surprisingly, there was a duckling, and it was making that sound!

Surprisingly, there was a baby duck standing on the side of the road, crying pitifully.
It was so cute, but where did it get lost?
We thought it must have just been born because it couldn’t walk properly.

Searching for ducklings’ nests

We decided to find its nest and take it back.
I once heard on the news that even if baby birds seem lost, their parents are usually watching nearby.
So we called our parents and started searching for the baby duck’s nest.
And we found it!!

There were baby ducks that had just hatched in the nest. So we quickly put a baby duck that had been left alone on the road back into the nest and returned to the road.
We watched from a short distance for about two minutes.
We thought the mother duck would come.
However, neither the mother duck nor the father duck appeared, and instead, all the baby ducks started jumping down.
The nest was in a slightly elevated crevice in the rocks, and the ducklings were jumping down onto the grass.
We quickly took off some of our clothes and spread them out to prevent the ducklings from getting hurt.

Do ducklings imprint on humans as their mothers?

All the ducklings jumped down onto the road and came toward us.
They were wobbly, which meant they were definitely newborn ducklings. There were eight of them in total. One egg had not hatched and appeared to be broken.
We put all the ducklings back in the nest, thinking that their mother might return and take them away.
However, the ducklings all came back down again.
If we moved even a little bit away, they would make loud chirping sounds and chase after us!
Do ducks imprint the first object they see as their mother? Could that be what happened to us? Especially since they only chase after my mom.

Mom wrapped her hands around the ducklings. It was truly amazing to see them fall asleep as if she were their mother.

We waited for the mother duck to return to her nest, just in case.

Just in case, we continued to wait for the mother duck. We watched over the ducklings for three hours, but no birds appeared.
After about three hours, two birds appeared. They were herons. I had a feeling that they were going to attack the ducklings.
We began to think the mother duck wouldn’t return. For some reason, the mother duck didn’t come back to the nest for several days.
How did the eggs hatch?
At the time, the weather was extremely hot, with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. I wondered if the eggs had hatched naturally due to the weather.

We quickly made a box to put the ducklings in and lined it with handkerchiefs. It seemed important to keep them warm.

Our brief encounter with the ducklings

So we asked the manager there. We couldn’t keep these wild animals…

We explained what had happened to the resort manager, and he said he would send the ducklings to a place called the “Wild Animal Protection Center.”

We didn’t even know such a facility existed, so we thought we had done a great job rescuing the ducklings and entrusted them to the manager.

The ducklings seemed to have imprinted on my mother as their mother, so they cried loudly.

Though my heart ached, we comforted ourselves by thinking that the ducklings would go to a better place, live safely, and grow up to return to nature, and we returned to the resort house.

The ducklings and our shocking reunion

The next morning, my mom went for a walk and was walking along the road.

But…! The baby ducks that were supposed to be sent to the wildlife rescue center were back on the road!

Three baby ducks ran toward my mom at lightning speed…!! They were crying loudly as they ran toward her!

Sensing that something was wrong, my mother called us, and we started looking for the other ducklings.
Unfortunately, three of the ducklings were found dead. We couldn’t find the other two.
What on earth happened? What did the staff at the management center do? They were supposed to take the ducklings to a wildlife rescue center.

Bad manager

Something felt off, so I went back to where the ducklings’ nest had been yesterday. The box we had made was torn and scattered around.
The staff member had simply put the ducklings back where they were because they were a nuisance at night.
Night must have been a terrifying time for the vulnerable ducklings. They must have been attacked by something… It seems likely that three of them died while scattering and fleeing in all directions.
We felt deeply saddened and guilty. On one hand, we were angry at the manager. If they had simply told us to take responsibility and bring them to the wildlife rescue center, we would have done so. But to say they would take care of them and then abandon those young lives…

We found the Wildlife Conservation Center and called them, but they didn’t answer. The organizations are divided by province, some are private, some are public, and we weren’t sure where to send the ducklings.

So we decided to take the ducklings home right away because they were so exhausted, and we wanted to temporarily care for them and figure out what to do.

Become a guardian of ducklings.

On the way home, we stopped at a rest stop to let them get some sun.

It must have been a rough night for these three ducklings… they must have been very scared, hiding somewhere.

The ducklings were tired and dozing in the sun. They were sleeping really well, knowing they were protected by our family.

That’s how we ended up bringing the three ducklings home. One of the three ducklings was the first one to show up and let us know where they were.

I was completely unprepared for this, but I ended up bringing the ducklings home and raising them. I thought I would release them as soon as they were safe.

The story continues in the next post.