Family rescues duckling from Durham highway

A family told WRAL News that they rescued a duckling that almost got hit and caused cars to scatter along a four-lane highway in Durham last Saturday.

Steve Peterson said that his children – but not his wife – urged him to stop the car and get out to rescue that animal that had caused him to swerve along the road.

He pursued the creature though a neighborhood on "a heroic half-marathon that nearly put me in cardiac arrest," Peterson wrote. The animal finally got cornered between a rusty riding lawn mower and a trailer.

"Gasping for what I hoped wouldn't be my last breath of warm Durham humidity, I wiped the sweat from my eyes only to see a tiny yellow and brown piece of fuzz, with two webbed feet half of its total body size and a half-inch numb for a beak protruding from its hard little head," he said.

The Peterson family took the two-day-old ducking home and named him "Lucky."

"I'm not sure if we named him Lucky, because he was lucky that he didn't get pancaked on the highway or if I was lucky that I didn't get shot for trespassing in a rough neighborhood," Peterson said.

Lucky calls the pool home, shares a bed and a water bowl with the family's chocolate lab and gets carried around everywhere by the girls, he said.

"Lucky is doing well living the high life at the Peterson Swim and Relaxation rescue resort with an all-you-can-eat bowl of crushed-up Cheerios and bean sprouts," Peterson wrote.