It was a sunny Sunday afternoon when a walker spotted a duck digging into its neck at Shoebury Park Lake.
The young lady came closer and saw that a bottle ring is around its beak and has wounded his neck. She immediately took a photo of the duck and posted it on Tilly’s Cloud, which is an animal rescue Facebook group.
The group members immediately answered to the call and went to the lake to find the duck on that same day. Unluckily, they were not able to find the duck, because it was already dark, so they called a team from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) were booked to attend on Monday.
The Tilly’s Cloud team, however, waited early in the morning and found the duck before lunch time with the RSPCA helping them catch the duck.
“Mark from Lost and Found Pets of Great Wakering stayed with the equipment to make sure nobody took it while I and Tilly Woods, a local veterinary nurse, and member of the Tilly’s Cloud group tried to catch the duck for hours,” Ryan Rees Pritchett, said to local media.
“The RSPCA inspector Joe arrived at midday and half an hour later and we got him with Tilly lying right next to the bank, me tempting him with bread and Joe waiting for the right moment to grab him. It was a total team effort. The piece of plastic was a washer which was caught under the ducks tongue and his mouth looked infected.”
The duck was safely taken to Orsett Wildlife Hospital to better tend to its wounds.
Mark Davies, from Great Wakering Lost and Found Pets, called upon the discarded waste in the lake, which affects wildlife dangerously.
“There is a disgraceful amount of discarded waste in that lake and some of it is dangerous to wildlife,” Davies said. “If you look at the parks on the surface, they look clean, but poor animals injured on Shoebury Park Lake by discarded rubbish show a very different side to the cleanliness and safety of the park.”
