Trigger warning (with happy ending): graphic video of cute duckling stuck inside a lily pad enclosure.

I couldn’t help post about the saga of the ducklings in the Lily Pond in Rockefeller earlier this spring — they have a very dedicated and vocal constituency — and it seems the drama continues. The next batch has arrived, cute as ever, and they are again struggling with some features of the pond. Turns out they are small enough to sneak between the bars of the wire fence around the lily pads, but somehow too big to get out. The video that K. sent shows the sad struggle.

While capturing this, she managed to alert the groundskeeper who freed the duckling by wading into the pond. He said he couldn’t remove the fencing entirely, but said he would try to get a finer mesh to surround the lilies.

It’s tempting to say this is messing with nature a bit too much, but then again, the entire scenario is man-made — from the pond to the lilies to the fencing around them — so might as well help a poor duckling out when there’s an easy solution.