Sometimes being a Wyoming firefighter is everything it’s quacked up to be.
That’s a lesson a crew of Laramie Fire Department responders learned Tuesday evening when they rescued a trio of ducklings that had fallen through a sewer grate.
“When we showed up — there was a crew of five of us that run together — we heard the ducks just quacking in the drain and mom was flying around frantically and quacking it up,” said LFD officer and EMT Chase Bridgmon.
The crew responded to a dispatch call at about 7 p.m. from a local resident who reported the ducklings in the storm drain and their momma flying and quacking around.
A fire crew was called to help Laramie police because it has more tools to pull up the storm drain grates, Bridgmon said.
And they had to pull up three of them before finally getting to the scared ducklings, he said. That’s because they kept running away into the underground tubes of the drain system.
“We really had to coax them out because they were in those tubes underneath,” Bridgmon said, adding they also put water into the storm drain to give the ducklings something to swim in. “We had to flush them out, basically.
“We could hear them and we could see them, but then they’d scurry back under the tubes.”
In the end, three scared and dirty, but otherwise healthy, ducklings were pulled from the storm drain at the corner of 14th and Harney streets.
“They were good,” he said about the ducklings’ condition. “They were worried and quacking, but they were fine.”
One of three ducklings pulled from a Laramie storm drain Tuesday. (Laramie Firefighters IAFF Local 946) 
Firefighters work to retrieve a trio of ducklings from a Laramie storm drain Tuesday. (Laramie Firefighters IAFF Local 946)
Big Relief For Mom
After the baby ducks were cleaned off a little, they were reunited with mom, who then also calmed down, he said.
“She was worried, big time. You could tell,” Bridgmon said. “She was hanging out in the field on the corner there, waddling around quacking and she’d fly around. She was acting like a worried mother of at least three.”
Although he’s been a Laramie firefighter for 16 years, Bridgmon said this was his first duckling rescue.
“That’s the first time I’ve done that,” he said. “I have, as cliché as it is to say it, but I’ve done the cat out of a tree thing before. We’ve done that to assist animal control. We have a really tall ladder that’s 90 feet tall, but that’s not a common thing.”
Compared to most of the emergency calls he responds to, Bridgmon said a duckling rescue with a happy ending is welcome.
It also shows that as an emergency responder, “every day is different,” he said. “It keeps us on our toes, for sure.”
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
