For the past three years in a quiet St. Paul neighborhood, a mother duck has hatched her brood on someone’s lawn, then led her ducklings toward a golf course across the street. But the ducklings never seem to make it without falling one-by-one through the same street grate.

In what has become an annual ritual, residents of the neighborhood fish out the peeping ducklings from the gutter on Sherwood Avenue and North Winthrop Street on St. Paul’s East Side. This year, the St. Paul Fire Department even helped.

“Why on God’s given earth do they do this every year?” asked Janet Syring who lives in the 2100 block of Sherwood Ave. “(The ducks) go over the same gutter and fall down.”

On Saturday, the mother duck paced back and forth on a house roof overlooking the gutter, crying to her ducklings who were trapped about 3 feet below ground.

Lying on their bellies, neighbors and firefighters used cardboard to block off sections of the sewer on the corner of Winthrop to herd the babies into one area. Rescuers went back and forth between two connected gutters across the street from one another, listening to the ducklings’ peeps and grabbing them using bare arms and a rake.

Over the course of 2-1/2 hours, the fire department retrieved 11 of the 14 ducks and realized two had died.

It took a full 30 minutes of running back and forth between the two gutters for the last duckling to be recovered by Nikki Syring, Syring’s daughter-in-law.

With tears in her eyes, Nikki Syring placed the last duckling in the bucket.

“It made my year,” Nikki said. “It’s a good feeling because you don’t want to leave the one.”

Meanwhile, the mother duck was nowhere to be seen.

Once the street was clear and the rescuers dispersed, Trish Pearson, whose parents, John and Marcy Posus, live in a house nearby, stood by the ducklings’ nest beneath the bay window and peered into the gray bin holding 12 chirping babies. If the mom didn’t come for them, she said, she would drop them off at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in St. Paul. She said it wasn’t the first time she had saved animals in the neighborhood.

The ducklings hatched on Thursday, Pearson said.

When she left her parents’ house on Friday night after a visit, she said that she saw the mother duck on the corner of Winthrop and Sherwood, just a few feet away from a sewer grate, and the ducklings were nowhere in sight.

When she came back to visit on Saturday, Pearson said, she had a feeling the babies were in the storm sewer.

Just like the past two years, a chirping chorus rose from the sewer yet again when she checked Saturday afternoon.

“Evidently, the ducks are not learning,” she said.

Perhaps the ducks aren’t learning to avoid the gutter, but every year, the mother has learned to wait nearby to return to them, Syring said.

Not only did the mother return, but a male duck also accompanied her, both waddling cautiously near the gutter about a half-hour after the ducklings had been saved.

Pearson took the bucket of ducklings and slowly approached the mother. When she poured the babies out, they stumbled but quickly gained their bearings and raced toward their mother in a symphony of peeps.

The mother and male duck rushed toward them, and in a pack, they waddled south, following the fence bordering Hillcrest Golf Course.

Laughing, Janet Syring said that when people think about their neighborhood, they’ll be known as “the people who dig the baby chicks out of the gutter.”

“Well, yes, we are!” she said.

Raya Zimmerman can be reached at 651-228-5524. Follow her at twitter.com/RayaZimmerman.