City workers, residents come together to save lives of 17 baby ducks

By: RAYMOND PARTSCH III
Managing Editor

The city of Ville Platte came together to save the lives of more than a dozen baby ducks.
Ville Platte resident Karen Perron was headed back to work Tuesday afternoon when she saw a wild mother duck and more than a dozen baby ducks walking, or waddling, down Court Street towards Main Street in Ville Platte. But as quickly as Perron spotted them the caravan of ducks quickly disappeared.
“They were walking down the street and then all of the sudden they were gone,” Perron said. “They had fallen through the grates of the drainage cover.”
Perron thought fast and quickly ran into the LSU Ag Center building and asked for a box to store the ducks. The next step was how to retrieve the ducks from the drains.
After city workers removed the grate from the other side of the street, where the ducks had traveled to, a group including several residents from the surrounding neighborhood, including 9-year-old Treylon Thomas, 10-year-old James Thomas, 13-year-old Jalen Thomas, former Ville Platte High coach Lionel Anderson and Katrina LeJeune helped retrieve the ducks.
The group was able to pull from the drain eight of the baby ducks. But the group could only hear faint sounds of the other lost ducks.
The Evangeline Parish First District Two, Ward One, the Ville Platte Police Department, Wildlife and Fisheries and Ville Platte Street Commissioner Yves Wilson all showed up shortly to offer assistance.
The fireman attempted to flush out the ducks by placing a water hose in a drain across the street but the two drains were not connected. The chances of saving the other ducks was diminishing by the minute but hope quickly spread through the group.
Wilson thought the ducks may have traveled down Cotton Street towards Ville Platte High School. His hunch was right. After barely missing the ducks at the first drain a block down the street, the group managed to get the grate off on the drain right in front of the high school.
After a few duck calls by Wilson, he climbed down in the drain and slowly retrieved nine more ducks. That brought the total of saved baby ducks to 17, which Scott Fontenot of the Wildlife and Fisheries said the baby ducks were a week or less old.
After securing the ducks in the box, and putting a dish of water inside the box, Fontenot took the ducks back to his office. Fontenot said that his department will take care of the ducks until they can find them a suitable rescue.
The ducks rescued on Tuesday were Mexican Squealers, which are a breed of ducks that roost in trees.
The mother and father ducks didn’t allow themselves to be captured.