Drama on the Canal

It was another lovely day so we headed to Hopwas and walked along the Coventry Canal before returning through Hopwas Woods to a well deserved Sunday roast at the Tame Otter.

The drama concerned 12 ducklings, but not some of these in the image.  We came upon a hen duck on the towpath.  She was standing on the grating above an overflow channel that ran for about 10 metres before cascading down an embankment to a brook below.  She was not intent on moving as we walked past, something that is quite unusual in our experience.  She was the first hen duck we'd seen without ducklings, or at least that was how it seemed.  I'm sure you are already ahead of me, but we stopped and she reluctantly jumped down into the water, but stayed close to the bank.  I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the grating.  12 very small ducklings were in the channel, about half a metre below the level of the canal water.

They were all huddled together, faint bleating sounds were coming from them but there was no way we could see that they could rejoin their mother.  We looked around for help, but no one else was around.  They travelled up and down the channel looking for a way back out and onto the canal and at the shallow end of the channel one did escape, by climbing up some vegetation that had grown in the channel.  

Unfortunately, that didn't satisfy the mother and she proceeded to jump down to the other ducklings and the 'rescued' one followed her!

I was desperately looking for something we could provide as a ladder to help them out of their predicament.  Fortunately, at the bottom of the cascade were some old wooden boards from an old fence.  I managed to get a couple and strategically placed them so they formed a ramp for the duckings to walk up back to the canal.

I wish I could say we saw the duckling march one by one out of the channel, but we didn't.  We left thinking that our presence was probably contributing to them being too scared to move, so we can only hope that they found their way out in the end.

While we were walking we got a text from our nephew, with a photo of his son.  It took a moment but a t-shirt with the words ‘big brother’ and holding a sonogram heralded the news of a new member of the family coming this autumn.