Two ducks wander around the Plaza pond in the wake of an attack that left broken nests and nearly destroyed the Plaza’s duck population. Photo by Ryan Lely.
Whatever killed the 13 ducklings in Sonoma Plaza’s pond this weekend threw enough of a scare into the adults that they’re mostly staying on the other side of City Hall.
“It could be a predator – some kind of animal or a dog,” city Parks Foreman Dave Chavoya said Tuesday morning. “(But) usually you’d find body parts or something like that around – we didn’t find anything. There was a nest that definitely was broken into, and you could see young ducklings in the egg being formed.”
Early Tuesday morning, a large patch of tule in the duckpond’s north end was still flattened and smears of broken eggs could be seen by the bridge. One white duck with what looked like a fresh scar down the back of its neck stood one-legged on the pond’s edge, head tucked partially under a wing – but not so far that it couldn’t keep a wary eye open.
The ducklings, born earlier this year, only got big enough to leave their pond within the past two or three weeks, Chavoya said, adding that he discovered they were missing Monday morning when he got a call from a local citizen.
“The older mature ducks were all hiding over here on the east side of City Hall where there’s a lot of shrubs,” Chavoya said, saying more than a dozen adult fowl frequent the duckpond. “I looked in there to see if there were any babies, but there were none.”
Sonoma police Sgt. Clint Shubel said that to his knowledge, no one had reported the incident. Chavoya said that raccoons and opossums abound around Sonoma Plaza, where they scavenge meals from the rich leavings of downtown restaurants. He added that some youths were arrested in the 1970s for throwing rocks and bottles at the ducks but that there was no hard evidence linking humans to the incident.
“For me, I’m not surprised about anything that happens,” he said. “It could be human activity, I don’t know.”
