Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

OGDEN — Catching ducks alive in the wild isn’t always an easy task.

The birds don’t follow commands, and if they can fly, even just a little bit, they’ve got a potentially easy way to elude your grasp.

But that’s what Adison Smith and Kade Tyler, founders of Wasatch Wanderers, do. It’s what they feel compelled to do. They leave wild animals alone but track domestic ducks and other domestic critters abandoned by their owners at ponds and other public areas, placing them at homes after catching them.

Smith and Tylor have been focusing of late on retrieving the domestic birds at Beus Pond Park in southern Ogden, a magnet for birds and people who like to feed them. “The main issue we have been facing this year is people dumping domestic ducks. We have never had this many dumped in one season,” said Julia Bowen, administrator of a Facebook page focused on the Beus Pond birds.

Last September, Smith and Tyler helped remove 34 domestic geese and 30 domestic ducks from around the pond at Weber State University’s Ada Lindquist Plaza. The birds had been famous for roaming the grassy areas of the campus.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

But the problem is hardly unique to the Weber State campus or Ogden. “This is an issue everywhere,” Smith said.

And with Easter coming up on April 17, Smith worries about an uptick. “Especially with Easter rolling around, people are going to be impulse buying ducks and abandoning them, not realizing the serious harm and illegal act they are doing,” she said.

That is, some people tend to buy animals like ducks and rabbits at farm supply stores when they are small, cute, cuddly and easy to care for, not necessarily thinking about what they’ll be like when they’re older and bigger. “People think, ‘I can just get rid of it when it gets annoying,'” Smith said.

Public ponds are a common dumping ground for domestic ducks caught up in such circumstances, which led to Smith’s and Tyler’s presence at Beus Pond last month. Domestic birds won’t survive over the long haul in a public outdoor setting, in part because they typically have limited flight ability.

“They have no way to protect themselves from predators. It’s pretty cruel,” Smith said. Moreoever, when domestic birds breed with wild ones, the offspring can have defects or limited flight ability, making them more vulnerable to predators.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

Government wildlife officials take a dim view of domestic animals in the wild and their approach when the problem gets too big can be to cull such populations — break the critters’ necks and kill them, shoot them, even gas them. “They’re a nuisance and a pest and they’re considered invasive,” Smith said.

The disappearance of some of the fowl at Beus Pond last month sparked concern among posters to the Beus Pond Facebook page that wildlife officials had a hand in the matter. Turns out the issue was likely a predator, a wild animal. “We had a scare that someone had harmed them. It turned out to be not the case,” Bowen said.

Either way, Smith and Tyler, working with the Beus Pond people as well as city officials, stepped in to try to safely remove the domestic animals. They find homes for the animals they pull from the wild.

Tyler focuses his animal-saving efforts on all sorts of animals, except dogs and domestic cats, which, relatively speaking, have larger pools of supporters.

“We’re animal lovers. We don’t really see a difference between them and us,” Smith said. “They matter and they don’t deserve to be treated the way they are.”

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

When Smith and Tyler made their foray last month to Beus Pond to retrieve the domestic ducks, their primary targets were several domestic Muscovy ducks, characterized by red around their face and beaks. They also hoped to nab a handful of birds tangled with fish line to free them of the line.

They tried several strategies — luring the birds with feed and chasing them, setting up fencing to try to corner them and other methods. In the end, though, they were able to capture just one Muscovy that day, to be taken to Friends in Need, an animal sanctuary in Eagle Mountain.

Smith and Tyler have tried to capture birds before at Beus Pond and it’s tricky, tougher than around Lindquist Plaza on the Weber State campus or in Parowan, another site where they retrieved domestic birds. Beus is more wooded, for one thing, creating obstacles in capturing birds and places where they can hide.

“It took us 12 hours to catch 64 waterfowl at WSU and three hours to catch 57 in Parowan,” Smith said. “But we have a new game plan, and with more people we could be more successful.”

The next time, however, resulted in the same take — just one Muscovy. Smith and Tyler are dedicated, though, and Smith said they won’t give up.

Tim Vandenack, Standard-Examiner

“We’re still working on it. It’s just a work in progress,” she said.