Baby ducks entertain Everett elementary school
Published 10:46 pm Friday, May 23, 2008
EVERETT — Students aren’t the only ones walking single file through the Whittier Elementary School campus these days.
A mother duck and her dozen newborn ducklings have made the courtyard their temporary home and have become the toast of the north Everett school.
Students arriving on campus Monday glimpsed their new feathery friends for the first time.
“There are 12 baby ducks,” first-grader Sofi Pingree explained. “We saw them walking toward us, and they’re pretty fast so we ran the other way.”
Sofi and all of the school’s other students know that they need to keep their distance so they don’t disturb the mother duck and cause her to flee her fledglings.
As a result, the campus is strangely quiet.
Kindergartners can tell fifth-graders to quiet down and the big kids actually listen.
The duck family is being treated like royalty. Maintenance and custodial workers have brought feed, straw and a ramp and have even filled with water a blue plastic swimming pool traditionally reserved for PTA carnivals.
They have a small hillside of horsetail weeds to explore and a wide berth to waddle around that is cordoned off with tape and a cyclone fence.
Teachers are seizing the opportunity to use the visitors in reading and writing exercises.
“It’s like when we had the squirrel in the classroom by accident last year,” said Patti Ingalls, a first-grade teacher. “The students enjoy writing about it.”
The ducks are expected to stay put through the end of the school year and fly away by summer.
Some students are pondering a change from the school’s Wildcats mascot.
“It will be funny if they changed our name to the Whittier Wild Ducks,” first-grader Kenzi Woods wrote in one of the writing exercises.
Reporter Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446 or stevick@heraldnet.com.
