South Yorkshire Times July 15, 1950
Sad Conisbrough Story of Six Wild Ducklings
When Mrs. Ruth Haw, of Doncaster Road. Conlsbrough, on Thursday befriended six little wild ducklings, which fell from the clouds (almost on her head) front their mother’s back, as she was returning from shopping one day, she hoped to rear them until they were able to fly. Unfortunately this pleasant little story has a sad ending, the six four-inch long, yellow and black ducklings died. Three on Thursday night and the others on Friday morning.
Mr. C. J. Haw, told a “Times” reporter his wife was walking up Doncaster Road on her way home from shopping on Thursday at dinner time. She heard a flutter of wings, and involuntarily stepped back as six wild ducklings dropped at her feet. Looking up she saw the mother, a brownish coloured wild duck, disappear over a wall in the direction of the castle. The ducklings quacked noisily around her feet, she ” shooed ” them up the road into a scrap yard near her home, where her husband was working.
Mr. Haw continued, “I immediately tried to catch them — a difficult job I can tell you—but they ran among the piles of metal.
” Eventually we caught five of them and were about to take them into the house when I saw the other one in a pile of scrap about 20 yards away. I chased it among the scrap and It managed to get into some fields .at the back of the yard where it disappeared and, we could not find it. I made a little wire-mesh cage and put the ducklings in it on the lawn in my garden, hoping that the mother would,see them and come for them,
I went back to work and later my wife was working in the kitchen when she saw one of the ducklings on the lawn. Thinking they had escaped she went on to the lawn and found that there were five ducklings in the cage and the one on the lawn was the ‘Prodigal son’ returned home. She put the ‘prodigal’ in the cage with the others.”
At tea-time the mother had not turned up and Mr. and Mrs. Haw had the ducklings running gaily about the kitchen. They fed them on bread and milk. Late at night they began to droop and though Mr. and Mrs. Haw did all they could to keep them warm with cotton wool and straw it was of no avail, three of them died, the others not long surviving them.