Things are just ducky for one Athens family flock, thanks to some impromptu duck-rescue heroics by a handful of observant Athens city employees last week.

Peering out their workplace window Friday, April 25, staff with the city’s planning department noticed a distraught mother duck in the parking lot across from city hall.

The vexed mother bird “was just going crazy,” said street department director Dolph Bradford, after his department received word of the unlucky duck from planning staff. As it turned out, there was a pretty good reason for all the ruffled feathers: Her ducklings “were trapped in a drain on Marion Street east of city hall in the lot owned by First Methodist Church.”

Once assembled at the site for a closer look, planning employees Andrea Colburn and Jackson Miller, alongside Heath McElyea and Chris Campbell with public works, discovered that ten baby ducks had been trapped in a storm drain.

Working together, the four staffers rescued the ducklings, including Colburn — one of the employees who crawled into the drain to stop the babies from waddling their way back into the pipe.

“We had to cover the pipe with a box,” said Colburn, “and as each baby came out, we scooped them up.”

Now that the flock’s back together again, they’ll be going to a place with far fewer urban hazards. The feathered family, said Bradford, is heading to a farm with an on-site pond so the mother duck can (hopefully) get her ducklings all in a row … and safely away from further pitfalls.