Woman jumps into motorway drain to rescue 8 ducklings — here's how she knew they were trapped

All animal rescue stories are bound to touch hearts, but this one looks like a montage straight out of Ghibli. A clip was shared on Instagram by Tykira Marine, @thehoriballer, on July 13, 2025, that showcased a woman getting undressed to jump into a storm drain to save a group of ducklings. Her attempt was successful, as the video shows the woman taking out the ducklings one by one and handing them to her friend, who would release them safely. The post also attracted a lot of attention with more than 1.4 million views and 97.1K likes so far. 

Marine was driving on the motorway when she spotted a duck with one duckling. Finding it strange, she mentioned, "Ducks don’t ever just have one duckling, so I hopped out to check it out, and they were all tweeting at me." Given their precarious location — inside a drain — Marine quickly pulled the lid and jumped down into the sewer water. With a friend by her side, the two women worked together to capture all the baby ducks and rest them in a field. As Marine scooped out 8 ducklings one by one, she asked, "Where's the mom?" to which her friend responded, "Over there, she's over there," pointing down the roadside to a mama duck waiting expectantly. As the ducklings belted frightened whistles, Marine assured them, "It's all right, it's all right." 

After all 8 are safely transferred to the grass, Marine runs past swooshing cars to nudge the mother duck onto the grass belt. This is when the magic happens. As she waddles towards her brood, the babies stop, turn their heads towards her, and melt into her arms. The beautiful clip was also shared on Reddit and garnered 86K upvotes on the post. u/InEenEmmer cautioned in the comments, "A duck mom will not leave behind their ducklings like that. And if you see a duck hanging around a grate like this, do have a look inside to see if there are ducklings who fell through."

While the mother duck does not leave the sight of her babies, ducklings also learn to follow their mother around for protection from an early age. In a study by scientists from the University of Oxford, it was shown that ducklings, like many young animals, learn to recognize and follow their mother through a process called imprinting, which happens shortly after hatching. In this study, ducklings were exposed to pairs of moving objects, some with the same shape or color, while others were different. Later, they were tested with new object pairs they had never seen before. Impressively, most ducklings chose the new pair that matched the same relationship as what they had originally seen. 

Professor Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University's Department of Zoology explained, “This is the first demonstration of a non-human organism learning to discriminate between abstract relational concepts without any reinforcement training." The ducklings learned concepts like 'same' and 'different' very quickly, which makes sense biologically as they need to recognize their mother despite her changing appearance while walking, swimming, or flying. 

The woman also shared another video of the incident on her Instagram account, captioned, "Part 1, I guess?" It featured the rescue in detail, how the two women discovered the struggling ducklings and opened the storm drain to take them out. Many Instagram users also filled the comment section of the viral clip with warm messages. @samxcas_ wrote, "A special seat in Heaven for you." @tbarneck exclaimed, "We all needed a positive video like this, thanks." @danny2bennett expressed, "This video wins the internet! Thank you, ladies, for restoring my faith in humanity."

For more wholesome animal content, follow @thehoriballer on her Instagram account.