Second Chance part 3 "title by makkie, written by LadyKenai"
 

Finally! The fishermen, kids and critters were gone. I walked over the other small bridge and put some large and small sticks going from the land into the water close to the dam, also some tall grass. This small bridge for the babies was located about 4 feet from where the grass and the dam meet. Now I walked back over the little bridge back to where makkie was sitting on the grass to give them space enough to feel comfortable and hopefull get these babies back to their warm, dry, quiet nest.

We waited and waited. One of the parents kept trying to get them up over the dam. The parent would get up the dam and walk across to the land where she hollered at the babies trying to get them back up. We were cheering the babies on saying, "go to the sticks!" GO, to the sticks! This wasn't working, now the parent was trying to get them to go up the small cliff very close to the dam, it was also too tall.
 
Now playing Second Chance part 3
Video by: wedazzleyou.com
 
   

The parent then walked over close to the sticks and one baby went up! Then the parent went a little farther away from the dam and the baby went back into the water! Oh dear! What can we do. This happened 3 times. Finally two babies had gone up and the parent took the two all the way on the grass to the other side of the dam. Whew! so two were saved.

Once the parent and babies went around the other side of the dam, I went and moved all the sticks and tall grass over to the corner where the dam and the grass meet. There are still four babies on this side of the dam, and now they are alone. Will the parents come back for the rest of the babies? It got dark and we had to go home, the only thing we can think at this point is that we helped two babies back. We slowly got on our bikes and rode home with bittersweet thoughts. At least we saved two of them.

We went back the next day to see the two babies in thier nest. They were not there! I then spotted one parent on the other side of the pond, went to one of our man purses on the bike got the binoculars and there was two babies and a parent. I saw the one parent seemed to be building on a new nest across from the original one, we are now guessing that something or someone had scared them out of the original nest, maybe that is why they swam over the dam in the first place.

Posted: 7 Nov 2008, by makkie