Quack squad of cops to the rescue!
She was one lucky duck on
Mother’s Day!
A family of ducks was spared from Big Apple traffic on Sunday, thanks to a quack team of New York’s Finest.
The cops were called to the scene on the Upper East Side, where they corralled a dozen ducklings in a special carrier shortly before 11 a.m. — while letting their mama follow her babies’ peeps back to their home in Central Park.
“It’s unusual,” said David Barrett, founder of Manhattan Bird Alert, who shot a Twitter video of the heartwarming rescue after calling the police.
He explained, “They generally want to stay in water. They are not keen on wandering outside of good habitats. But, you know, ducks do crazy things sometimes. And that’s what happened.”
Police caught up with the daredevil duckies on East 69th Street after they crossed Lexington Avenue, three heavily trafficked boulevards — Park, Madison and Fifth Avenues — away from the park.
Barrett said the bustling traffic wasn’t the only danger the ducklings faced on their wayward waddle through Manhattan — they might also have been attacked by dogs on the sidewalk.
He said that police initially sought to put the mother duck inside their squad car to drive the whole clan back to the park, but that she was less than cooperative.
That’s when they came up with the idea of letting her follow her brood instead.
“The solution they came up with — which I think was a brilliant one — was not to wait for the mother to fly into the police car, which it just didn’t seem to want to do, but to take the carrier outside of the car and carry it into Central Park and let the mother follow along,” Barrett said. “That worked out very well.”
It’s not clear how long the birds had been wandering around the wilds of the big city.
It’s not the first time it’s happened — last year, a fluffy flock waddled out of Morningside Park in upper Manhattan before being rescued.
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Mother’s Day heroics.