Tame Ducks Display Rare Homing Instinct

1920

Three Gift Birds Fly Thirty Miles to Former Owner's Farm

OMAHA, Nebraska — Sophus Neble presented three tame "wild" ducks to County Surveyor Lou Adams when Lou was out at the Neble farm south of Springfield. Lou brought them in his Buick to his home here and put them in the chicken house.

The next day Mrs. Adams turned them out in the yard. When Lou came home that evening he couldn't find the ducks. He searched high and low in the chicken house, but no ducks. Then he asked Mrs. Lou.

"Why, I turned them out in the yard," said she.

"Well, they're gone," said Lou. "We'll never see them again."

But he was half wrong. Gone, that ducks were, without a doubt. But that evening came a telephone call from the Neble farm.

"Your ducks are down here," was the message. "They arrived this morning and are in their old pens."

The ducks, by the mysterious sixth sense possessed by birds, had found their way from the Adams home in the midst of the city to the Neble farm, 30 miles away.

"I can't see why they didn't join the big flocks of ducks now flying north," said Lou. "But they didn't. They just went straight home, arriving there within an hour or two after their probably departure from my yard."