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PROVO — In the 28 years Parley Petersen managed Riverside Country Club, he’d encountered his share of ducks.
“Every spring we have some ducks, and we’ve had ducks up on the patio of the clubhouse, we’ve had ducks down by the refreshment stand behind you, and we’ve had ducks on the golf course — little ones, big ones,” said Petersen, now a retired golf course regular. “Yeah, (I’ve) had some good experience with them.”
Nobody’s experience with ducks, however, may now rival that of Connor Orton, Skyler Tanner and Josh Figgins — three player assistants who found themselves in the middle of some frantic quacking Tuesday afternoon.
Thirteen ducklings had somehow found themselves trapped in a storm drain.
“You had the mom running around in distress,” said Figgins, who found himself working just feet away from the curbside drain at the time. “I radioed Connor and Skyler to come up and help me and see and find out what we could do about it, and they had the idea to take the (grate) off.”
After they lumbered the heavy grate away from the curb, they still needed the right club — as with any situation on a golf course.
“It was one of the members’ 7-irons and a pool skimmer,” said Orton, who lowered himself down into the drain with the unlikely rescue tools. “I just basically scooped them onto the skimmer about two at a time and pulled them out of the pipe and Skyler grabbed them out.”
Tanner said the mother of the 13 ducklings seemed visibly relieved.
“The mom was waiting right over in the bushes and we’d set the (ducklings) down, they’d run right to the mom,” Tanner smiled. “She seemed to like us at the end of everything.”
Video captured of the rescue ultimately showed the family of ducks waddling back toward the golf course.
“Things like that don’t happen all the time, so it was fun,” Figgins said. “I felt good about it. I thought it was cool to see just how distraught the mom was and then after it, how happy or just how she calmed down after we got all of the babies out of there.”
Petersen said he was also happy to hear that the ducks had survived.
“Little ducks don’t survive all the time, but they’re fun to watch and they’re fun to be around,” Petersen said.