Keeper was discovered walking around in a Walmart parking lot, bewildered and alone. Because the parking lot was not near any water, it’s quite probable that she was thrown there. Fortunately, Keeper was seen by a concerned woman, who contacted Alyssa’s Animal Sanctuary to see if they could assist.

“She is a Pekin duck so she can’t fly, so to be hanging around a place where there is no water nearby is weird for a duck to start but then this woman noticed she was staying up near the doors, near where people were at, like she wanted someone to help her, and when she noticed she had difficulty walking and had a bad limp, that’s when she decided to call us,” Alyssa Barry, founder of Alyssa’s Animal Sanctuary, told The Dodo.

The sanctuary took Keeper in and discovered that she’s pigeon-toed, a disability that may have led to her being abandoned. As they worked on getting Keeper settled in with the other ducks at the sanctuary, they quickly realized she had another issue that greatly affected her.

 

“We saw she had problems swimming immediately away,” Barry told The Dodo. “When her feathers were wet, the water did not bead off of her as it should have, instead soaking her and making her soggy. So her capacity to float and stay above water became challenging for her, and as she paddled her feet, her feet would strike one other, causing her to become stressed, so we would pull her out of the water, and we quickly understood that she wouldn’t be able to use our enormous pool.”

After a little research, Barry realized that Keeper was born without a preen gland, which produces oils that make ducks waterproof. Her missing gland on top of her pigeon-toed feet meant that Keeper wouldn’t be able to swim and hang out in the water with the other ducks, as she could end up drowning, and Barry could tell that not being able to be near her new family for most of the day made Keeper sad right from the start.

 

“She of course has a kiddie pool that she can get into anytime and stand in, but ducks like to stay with their paddlings (their group/family), so every day I would watch as her family would go up into the pool and she would sit at the bottom of the ramp by herself until they came back down,” Barry said. “It made me sad to watch her sit alone at the bottom of the ramp while her family played in their pool all day, and just wait for them to come back down out of the pool.”

Barry was stumped as to how to allow Keeper to spend the entire day with her family while being secure — until one day, while going through Walmart, she discovered a large floatie looking like a duck.

 

Barry had no idea if the floatie would work out or not, but she decided it was worth a try. She brought it back to the sanctuary and tried to teach Keeper how to use it, and after a little trial and error, the little duck became a pro.

“She learned very quickly that she could balance perfectly fine on it, and she WANTED to be on it,” Barry said. “It only took her a few minutes to realize that now she was in the pool with her family and she was perfectly content and sat there all day long. It just sort of became this daily thing, where we would pick her up and put her on her float and she loved it. I think she finally felt like she could be part of her family again.

 

“The other ducks haven’t even tried to come on her floatie or annoy her while she’s on it,” Barry added. “She simply sits on it all day and it blows around the pool in the breeze and it’s amazing!”

Even though Keeper herself isn’t exactly water safe, her family at the sanctuary made sure there was a plan in place in case she ever fell in the pool and someone wasn’t around to help her. There’s an underwater ledge that extends out from the ramp into the pool, so if Keeper accidentally loses her balance and falls in, she can get herself safely to the ledge and then use it to jump back onto her floatie. It’s all been working out really well, but of course, the sanctuary is always trying to come up with ways to make her life even easier.

 

“We’re working on enlarging the ledge to go the length of the pool and making it even more accessible for her,” Barry added. “But her duck floatie has been life-changing for her.”

Keeper may be a little different from the other ducks, but she can accomplish everything they can, owing to her duck floatie, with a little more elegance.