A friend of my sister’s found a presumably abandoned duckling in the parking lot at work. She would like to nurse it back to health and maybe even release it back into the wild. What care and feeding instructions should she follow?
I don’t know how feasible it would be to release the duck (his name is Murdock :)) back into the real wild, but there is a rather large park about 30 minutes away from where she lives that might make a nice home for him. It’s a city park (Hagerstown, MD) and there are other ducks and geese which people feed, so Murdock wouldn’t have to have all the skill necessary to live in the wild.
I, personally, have no idea, but if your sister calls her state Department of Natural Resources (or whatever they call it in your neck of the woods) they’ll give her plenty of resources.
I think the standard response, though, is to try to find a wildlife rehabilitator, as they have the experience and know-how to do a better job than your sister probably could.
Frank, I’ve got to level with you. Ducklings don’t do so well without a mom. We had lots of ducklings. 65-70% of the ones we bought from the feed and grain store died when they were very small. 95% of the ones who were second-generation ducks who lived with their moms (and dads) lived to duckhood. Maybe Murdock will be brighter than the ducklings we had…I don’t know why having a parent duck made a difference, but most of our deaths were due to eating things they oughtn’t. You can clean their pen every single day, but if you miss one tiny bit of spoiled food- which can be hard to spot since baby duck food needs to be mushy the first few weeks so they can eat it. mush looks like mush, you know?- they will eat it, and die of what seemed to be food poisoning . I don’t know if their parents taught them not to eat random things, or, if mom and dad were just heartier and found and ate stuff first. Evenually, after about 15 or 20 ducklings, we gave up on babies and bought adults - they made babies for us after that.
If she keeps it, I wish her the best of luck. But it’d be better if she found a bird rehabilitator- unless she wants to get at least one more duck, because solitary ducks aren’t a good idea. If a state as small as NH has more than one bird rehabilitator, surely most other states do as well.
Thanks for the link, that has a lot more listings than the site I came up w/ during my cursory search.
The nearest one is still a bit of a jog from where the friend lives, but I’ll let her know about that, if she’s interested.
That tidbit about ducklings eating spoiled food really makes you think about darwinism in ducks, lol. You’d think they’d develope better eating habits by sheer natural selection…I guess not…
