My mother works for a non-denominational Christian school. The building she works in is an old Catholic school building that the school bought. It used to house nuns who were the teachers; it has lots of old statues of the Catholic saints, etc.; it is a beautiful old building. It also has an enclosed courtyard with grass, trees, picnic tables, etc.

Apparently some time ago a female duck flew into the court yard, constructed a nest, and laid her eggs. Now she can be seen waddling around the grounds surrounded by nine fluffy little ducklings. The problem is, they're trapped. The only way for them to get back out and into the wild is to fly out, and of course the ducklings aren't able to. There's very little food or water for them in the courtyard.

My mother, an animal lover, has adopted these ducks. She's planning to call the Humane Society or a similar organization to try to get the ducks rescued. (She'd probably try to do it herself, but they're unaccustomed to people and not about to let anyone pick them up.) She's been feeding them, leaving things like bread crumbs and birdseed strewn around on the sidewalk for them.

Unfortunately, the ducklings are stupid. This courtyard has several deep pits which provide air and light to basement windows of the school building. The tops of the pits are protected by an iron grill. The ducklings will go walking across the iron grill, which is fine, but then they'll come to a slightly larger hole in it and *plop! Down goes a ducky! My mother and sister rescued two ducklings from one of these pits on Monday night, with my father's help. (The iron grills are rather heavy.) Last night, she went back to check on her ducks, and my wife and I went along. When we got there, we only saw four ducklings waddling around the courtyard with their mother. Sure enough, a high-pitched, multiple peeping sound led us to another of the window pits, and there were five ducklings down there huddled together.

So of course, we moved the heavy iron thing again--my wife injuring her hand in the process--and I used a ladder to descend into the hole. The ducklings, of course, didn't want to be rescued, at least not by a human, so they went scampering back and forth across the bottom of the pit while I tried to corner them and grab 'em. We did finally get them all out, though. We covered up the larger slats in the coverings as best we could so that the ducklings don't fall through again. The cover that we took off stayed off, though, leaving a gaping hole. We couldn't put it back with only two of us. Hopefully, the ducks will be smart enough to stay away from an obvious pitfall.

I have come to the following conclusion: ducks are stupid. The mother duck was stupid to fly into an enclosed area and lay her eggs where there was no food or water (except when it rains). The baby ducks are stupid for falling into the pits, not once, but twice. And quite probably some of them have fallen in there again and will have to be rescued once more.

Gri"perhaps eric should find some new ceremonial creature to hand out in RinkChat"shny