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Duck waddles onto Brooklyn subway tracks amid train delays

duck
What the duck!: A quacker waddling along the tracks by the Eighth Avenue subway station on Dec. 4 slowed down service.
Courtesy of the MTA

It was a wild duck chase!

A duck hobbled onto the tracks at the Eighth Avenue Subway Station on Wednesday morning, causing an hours-long circus to bring the waddling wayfarer to safety, according to transit officials.

A train service supervisor spotted the quacker walking on the northbound tracks just before noon, and reported the bird to authorities, according to Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman Shams Tarek.

Subway operators were instructed to proceed with caution as personnel tried to remove the duck — which took nearly a half hour. At about 12:25, the subway supervisor was able to trap the bird under a construction cone, according to Tarek.

An hour later, the supervisor safely escorted the hen to the platform, and then carried her outside the subway station to prevent her from jumping back onto the tracks, Tarek said. After some time, the employee handed the quacker to a friendly passerby who offered to take the bird home. 

The bird hunt didn’t cause any train delays — although it did coincide with a separate slowdown because of a train’s activated emergency brakes, Tarek said.

This wasn’t the first time an animal interrupted service at the Eighth Avenue station. In June, commuters spotted a turkey on the station’s tracks, and in Aug. of 2018, police rescued two goats found grazing by the subway stop, whom Comedian Jon Stewart adopted and transported to an animal shelter upstate.