BATON ROUGE — A mother duck at the LSU lakes laid her eggs in a tree, leading to several of her ducklings needing to be rescued on Sunday afternoon.

John Newman, also known as "The Duckman," discovered the eggs and made it his mission to see that they hatched and rejoined their mother in the water when the time was right. 

Newman started feeding the ducks at the LSU lakes in 2022 while his wife was in hospice care. Since then, he's been following the mother duck's journey from a golden duckling, giving her the name "Goldie", to her new adventures as a mother.

"I noticed she wasn't coming to eat for a while, and then she came down a few weeks later, and I saw her fly down out of this tree," Newman said. "Turned out, she laid her eggs up there."

Newman continued to check on the eggs periodically until he noticed broken eggshells around the tree's base.

"So figured they were hatching, got a ladder and climbed up, and they were still hatching, so I figured I'd just let nature take its course."

He raked leaves around the bottom of the tree to help soften the fall in case any of the eggs or ducklings took a tumble out of the nest, which came in handy as an egg and one of the ducklings in his care ended up on the ground.

However, on Sunday, while two of the 15 eggs didn't hatch, the other ducklings began walking up the tree instead of heading to the water. Newman called for help when the ducklings were more than 10 feet off the ground.

"Just so happened the fire department was going by, and I flagged them down, and they were able to climb up there and get the ducklings out of the tree," Newman said. "So now I got them in the box, and I'll try to get them with their mom out there."

This is Goldie's second brood of the season and third overall, according to Newman. He believes she laid her eggs in the tree to avoid the more aggressive males. 

"I've seen her fly up in the tree before to get away from them when they start getting too close to her. It's like her safe space."

While Newman raises abandoned ducklings, he feels he still owes them a debt that has yet to be repaid. 

"Feeding the ducks and just listening to them carry on got me through kind of a dark time in my life, so I feel like I owe 'em one."