After a while I decided they really needed help, they must have
been exhausted, so I found the exceptionally long handled net, that our
gardeners use to fish out anything that gets blown into the swimming
pool. With this I very gently lifted them out and thought all
was well.
Trapped in the Swimming Pool
But within minutes a bigger problem occurred,
because before we realised it, they had all jumped into the swimming
pool. We think their mother was looking for their dad, who was
nowhere to be seen. We had seen him some days before, a few times asleep
on one leg, at the edge of the swimming pool.
The problem then, was that all round the pool, the wall was much
higher above the water, than at any of the other ponds. So,
their mother had obviously not realised that they would be stuck,
worse still, she was afraid of me and the net. Our swimming
pool is a large one and she easily kept herself and the
ducklings well out of reach. We watched them swimming all
round, but there was nowhere low enough for the ducklings to get
out, and we believed the ducklings were tired. By then it was
late afternoon, and the sun was going down.
I took this and put one end on the top step, and the other end
resting on the wall, forming a ramp for them to go up. I
was not sure how long this board would remain solid in water and
decided with Trudy's help to try to send them towards it.
We
spent a lot of time trying, but the mother duck, even though we got
her to go quite near that part of the pool, never seemed to look at
it, and instead was always watching us,