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The faint chirps interrupted an otherwise quiet Sunday stroll for a few Virginia Beach residents.
A pair of ducklings had fallen into a storm drain and were trying to coordinate their escape. Lucky for them, an officer now dubbed the “Duck Whisperer” answered the call.
The youngsters apparently had been abandoned by their mother after falling over a water-retention wall — about a 4-foot drop — at the Central Park pond off of Columbus Street at Town Center. From an access grate to the storm drain, which is about 12 feet deep, Officer Isaac Ankrom could hear their occasional chittering as he tried to assess the situation. Then they went quiet.
Some of the passersby had tried to coax the ducklings out with a stick and a bucket to no avail. Ankrom, 27, called Animal Control but was put on hold. So he decided to go into the tunnel himself.
He recalled that one of his fellow officers kept a pair of muck boots in his patrol car, and armed with just a flashlight and bucket, he climbed down.
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He soon realized why he could no longer hear them: Some of the debris that had blocked the flow of water had broken apart, and the flow was too fast for the ducklings to get back upstream. Ankrom, who is from western Pennsylvania and has been with the Virginia Beach Police Department for 4 ½ years, came to a set of bars meant to stop debris. He couldn’t get through without taking off his vest and belt.
Now in his civilian clothes, he crouched through the dank tunnel, dodging spiders and other bugs, for about 45 yards until he came to a four-way intersection.
“I could hear them just talking and once I got to the intersection I just looked down all four ways to see which way they went,” Ankrom said Friday. “So I made a left and I could see them, but the further I went, the further they would go.”
He had to change his strategy. Otherwise, he would be chasing them under the whole city, he quipped.
Officers don’t train for these situations. Their pet and wildlife guidance is mostly confined to handling an aggressive dog and managing a scene for animal control, he said. So he had to rely on his experience as an outdoorsy kid in Pennsylvania. Somewhere in that lake of memories he got an idea: He shined his flashlight on the water back up the tunnel and waved it a bit to get the birds’ attention.
The ducklings saw the light and turned around, heading upstream and in the right direction.
“They were fighting the current and it took them some time but they were able to swim past me over my feet and I was able to lead them all the way back out towards the exit,” he said.
But getting them into the bucket was another challenge.
“I got one into the bucket initially and the other one ran away because they started like tweeting at each other — communicating I guess,” Ankrom said. “But once they both got back together ... they stayed together and I was able to get them all the way back to that room and then corner them.”
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Once he got them out, seemingly uninjured, he handed them over to a woman from Tidewater Rehabilitation & Environmental Education. She tried to see if any adult ducks in the area recognized the wayward ducklings, but none seemed to know them.
Public works was notified to fix the storm drain access point’s cover, which had fallen into the tunnel and left a dangerous opening, according to Ankrom.
Ankrom always seems to be the one to get the strange calls for service, he said. On social media, other officers started calling him the “Duck Whisperer” for his heroics.
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“Everyone in the comments is like, ‘only Ankrom,’ because I always get the bizarre calls for service,” he said, adding that such an adventure depends on the officer’s comfort level.
This wasn’t even his first duck rescue — back in Pennsylvania about seven years ago he rescued a duckling that had fallen down a much larger spillway. It had gotten separated from its mother, who was back at the top.
“I’ve hunted and I’ve been outdoors a lot so that was definitely more of my exploration side on wanting to go in the tunnel and try to pick up the ducks,” he said. “That’s just me kind of being an outdoorsy person and wanting to help whatever I can.”
Ankram said he hopes he can be there if and when Tidewater Rehabilitation & Environmental Education releases the ducklings back into the wild. Asked if he would be interested in keeping them as pets, he said no — but his wife might.
Gavin Stone, 757-712-4806, gavin.stone@virginiamedia.com