This Michigan Elementary School's courtyard is the ideal home for ducks since it is enclosed from natural predators.
When students at this Massachusetts elementary school play ‘Duck, duck, goose,’ they take the game quite literally.
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For almost the last ten years, mother ducks have been nesting their young in an enclosed courtyard in the The Glover Elementary School.
Principal Sheila Kukstis told InsideEdition.com that each year around Memorial Day, the Milton school community waits patiently for a mother duck to begin knocking on windows to signify they are ready to leave the predator-free environment, and bring her babies into the wild.
This year, the elementary school expected two sets of ducklings to hatch, but a third mother duck surprised the entire community with an unexpected knock on the window.
“We had no idea. We didn’t even know that this duck was there,” Kukstis laughed, even though normally, a webcam that broadcasts the ducks live in the school’s lobby captures their every move. “They were so well camouflaged.”
But she made their presence abundantly known when Tuesday morning, at around 10:30 a.m. they began knocking on the library windows, where students were preoccupied with their standardized exams.
“All (the teacher) said was, ‘I heard their little beaks, and I had to ignore it, I was proctoring!’” Kukstis recalled.
Once the exams ended, Kuktis said she quickly alerted the staff and parents that might want to watch and organized this year’s Duck Run within the hour.
“I have the children line up. They go outside, they have to be very quiet,” Kukstis told IE.com.
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But Kuktis said the school is used to having the ducklings come at inconvenient times. Because ducklings need to reach water within 24 hours of hatching, school principal Dr. Sheila Kuktis said she often needs to enter the school on a weekend.
Last year, the ducks came on the Fourth of July, and Kuktis said she had to leave her festivities to open the school and let the ducks out.
Kuktis said she gets much help from parent volunteers in the community. One parent even wrote a book about last year’s duck hatch to use a hands-on lesson for the students, in a supplement to the natural hatching of their community’s ducklings.
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