Ducks are turning up dead in John McLaren Park, but it’s not an avian virus that’s killing them.
Neighbors have so far found three dead ducks struck by yellow darts, and others that are wounded, according to Portola resident Chuck Farrugia.
“Everybody’s angry,” the retired firefighter told The Standard by phone on Saturday. “Everybody wants to catch the culprits.”
Farrugia said his wife and daughter first found a duck struck by a dart near McNab Lake on Dec. 23. Soon afterward, Farrugia and his neighbors started calling San Francisco Animal Care and Control.
Agency spokespeople initially said they would not retrieve any dead ducks because of the bird flu risk, but when a neighbor waded into the water to retrieve a carcass, animal control agents agreed to test it, Farrugia said.
It did not have bird flu, he continued, but the timing is unfortunate; city health officials announced Friday the first human case of avian flu in San Francisco.
According to Farrugia, animal control employees have since come back to the lake and have tried to catch a living duck struck by darts so they can treat it, but have so far been unsuccessful.
Neighbors, meanwhile, are standing by, ready to chip in for the veterinarian’s bill. But they’re worried about the culprit, whom Farrugia imagines as a mischievous teen.
“If a kid can shoot a dart at a duck,” Farrugia said, “[then] more than likely, when he gets older, he could shoot something worse — and it could be at a person.”
This comes just a week after the discovery of a butchered baby animal at another city park.
So far, there’s no evidence that suggests anything about the identity of the perpetrator. Neither animal control nor the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department immediately responded to requests for comment.