Last week, Kevin O’Connor was playing a video game in the basement of his home in Nantucket, Massachusetts, when an odd sound made him hit pause. His family dog, Buddy, was by his side — and it was clear the pup heard it, too.
“I heard this loud chirping,
and at first I just brushed it off because I thought it was a bird outside,” O’Connor told The Dodo. “But then Buddy started scratching on the walls and on the windows, so I decided to check it out.”
The 12-year-old young man walked toward a window well and couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I saw a baby duckling there, and I was honestly surprised he was jumping around, because it was, like, a 6-and-a-half-foot drop from where the duck fell,” O’Connor said.
He raced upstairs and outside to see if he could find the rest of the family. “I first checked my surroundings to see if I could see the mother, and I didn't see any other ducks,” he said.
Then he told his dad, Matt O’Connor, who called Nantucket Animal Rescue. The group saves sick and injured wildlife on the island.
Within 15 minutes, volunteers Bill Bronson and Jenn McCormick were on the scene, ready to help.
“I was actually shocked that this little guy or gal had no broken wings,” McCormick told The Dodo. “The duckling could not have been more than a couple of days old.”
But getting the duckling out of the window well was the first challenge the rescuers would face that day.
“We were in the basement, and the window was up 4 or so feet, so I had to get up to that to be able to drop my body down to the bottom of the window well,” McCormick said.
McCormick pulled it off and secured the duckling in a crate. Then she and Bronson thanked the O’Connors and drove around the neighborhood looking for other ducks, but could not find any.
Their next stop was a local pond packed with ducks, where they hoped another mother duck would adopt the duckling.
Mother ducks will, on occasion, raise orphaned ducklings if they’re roughly the same age as their own hatchlings, which proved to be the second challenge that day.
“There must have been 200 to 300 ducks there, but no mothers, no ducklings,” McCormick said.
The pair of rescuers waited, staking out the pond, and were about to give up when a mother duck with similarly aged ducklings suddenly came out of the thicket.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” McCormick said. “I'm like, ‘Bill! Bill!’ I was subtly yelling at him like, ‘Get going to release the duckling,' because you have very little time before the mother takes off with the rest of her ducklings.”
Bronson released the duckling, and McCormick filmed the life-changing moments that followed.
“It was just amazing to see,” McCormick said. “The way that mother bolted over and the way that duckling ran across the surface was just breathtaking. It was the best day ever. We got lucky at the last minute; we were high-fiving each other, it was like we won the lotto.”
While there are many heroes in this story, O’Connor credits Buddy and the rescue volunteers for the happy ending. “I never would have noticed the duckling without Buddy,” he said.
