UW News

July 23, 2009

Faculty, staff come together to help campus make way for ducklings — really!

In the 1941 children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings, Boston police decide to stop traffic so that a family of mallards can cross the road safely. On the UW campus nearly 70 years later, a loose collection of faculty and staff have come together to help keep a family of ducklings safe in Frosh Pond.


If you’ve been by the pond lately, you’ve seen a sign with the headline “Make way for ducklings!” and near it a ramp leading from the surrounding sidewalk into the pond. The ramp is to help the ducklings into and out of the water; the sign is to ask human visitors to stand back and let the ducklings use it.


Why all the fuss? Well, the ducks — mallards, like in the book — have a habit of building nests and laying eggs on campus. When the babies are big enough, the mother leads them to water, and guess which water is most convenient? The problem is, the mother can get into the pond but the babies can’t because they can’t fly.


“It’s not intuitive to her that the ducklings can’t get into the pond because most water is straight downhill from land and there’s not a little wall,” said Julia Parrish, director of the Program on the Environment and a biologist who specializes in waterfowl.


So, the mother duck gets into the pond and the ducklings are left on the sidewalk looking distressed. Enter well-meaning humans who scoop up the babies and place them in the pond. Which is fine because they can swim, but not fine because they can’t get out of the water to dry off.


That’s why, for many years, the grounds crew provided a ramp during duckling season. “Then they began having problems with the water quality in the pond, and it was thought that the ducks might have something to do with it,” said Rick Cheney, director of maintenance and alterations in Facilities Services. “So we stopped providing the ramp and we relied on PAWS to move the ducks to Lake Washington, which never worked very well.”


The situation really came to a head last year, when two duck families got into the pond and a pest management company was asked to take them to PAWS. Unfortunately, their employee botched the job, separating the mother duck from the babies and causing consternation among the animal lovers on campus. That’s when Charles Easterberg, UW public health adviser, decided to write a procedure for dealing with the ducks and the University and the animal lovers came together to find ways to better protect the ducklings in the future.


Easterberg’s preference is that ducklings not already in the pond not be placed there because, he said, it is hard for them to grow up in that environment. Instead, an animal specialist should be called to remove the whole family to open water. One way the average person can do this, he said, is to place the ducklings in a box and to tilt the box so that the mother can see them. She will then follow wherever the ducklings are taken. Parrish confirms that this method will work and will preserve the parent-offspring attachment so important to ducks. She believes, however, that duck families don’t necessarily need to be removed from campus.


“What’s a natural location for a mallard?” she asked. “It’s an almost completely domesticated duck. If you go to Green Lake, is that a natural location? Some of us would say no.”


As it turns out, the question is now moot because the state Department of Fish and Wildlife has ruled that the ducks should not be trapped.


“Waterfowl and birds in general are all protected under a blanket federal law called the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,” Parrish said. “I wouldn’t say it’s universally enforced, but that doesn’t mean it’s not on the books. What it says is, you can’t do anything to birds without a permit. The way it’s interpreted in Washington is, if the birds are not a nuisance or directly in harm’s way, you can’t rescue them.”


This is the first year that the state department ruled specifically on the ducks at the UW. And after last year’s controversy, everyone was determined to see a better outcome this time.


That’s why a ramp appeared almost immediately after animal lovers called Facilities Services to report the ducklings in the pond. Parrish then thought a sign would be helpful to inform the many passers-by of the situation. She gathered helpful suggestions on wording from other interested parties and called on a graphic designer to put something together quickly.


Although the ducklings are as safe as they can be, Easterberg — who has been a birder for 50 years and is not unsympathetic to ducks — urges people to realize that ducklings have a high mortality rate. “The female lays from 12 to 16 eggs in a clutch and only one or two of those may survive to adulthood,” he said. “Otherwise we’d be knee deep in ducks. A lot of people are very concerned and they don’t realize that this high mortality rate is very natural with wildlife.”


It’s therefore quite possible that something could happen to these ducklings (being eaten by a crow or gull, for example), or any ducklings in the pond, in full view of the campus community. If we can’t legally move the ducks to open water and must have the ducklings in the pond, we will have to be tolerant of that possibility, Easterberg said.


Parrish, meanwhile, has hopes that last year’s controversy will ultimately lead to even better outcomes than what happened this year. She would like to get students involved in several related projects:



  • In her own Program on the Environment, an experiential class called FYI will likely look at wildlife on campus next spring.
  • She hopes a design/build class in Landscape Architecture will focus on designing a duck ramp that is attractive, conforms to what the ducklings need and can be easily put up and taken down.
  • She would like Information School students to get involved with designing signage that would give people information not just about the ducklings, but about campus wildlife in general.


“Let’s face it, the ducklings are stars,” she said. “When I was at the pond for lunch one day, I counted 50 people watching them and taking pictures of them. I think the trick is to look responsibly at the entire campus and say okay, we have a campus that’s hosting people and wildlife. How can we make the most of that?”