Feathered friends focus of neighborhood concern
City officials mull plans for park improvements, duck protection
by Susanna P. Barton

The city is floating ideas to improve the Duck Pond park, a stroke that would potentially protect the well-being
of the Duck Pond’s namesake webbed residents.

“The mayor had a meeting with me and a couple of
staff members at the park about a month ago,” said District 5 City Councilman Art Shad. “We discussed possibly
including it in the budget and looking at maybe setting up capital improvement money to do an upgrade of the Duck
Pond — and as part of that upgrade, a priority would be anything that could be done to protect the ducks even
more.”

The city is floating ideas to improve Colonial Manor Park —a stroke that could potentially protect the wellbeing
of “the Duck Pond’s” webbed residents. Duck Pond maven Suzanne Honeycutt has been raising awareness of
the ducks’ plight.

Several months ago, she watched the city bring two “Duck Crossing” signs to the neighborhood. They have been placed facing north- and south-bound traffic just before the park. Honeycutt, however, said the signs have done little to slow drivers in an area where 35-miles-an-hour may be too fast given the ducks and pedestrian traffic.

“My thoughts are that the speeding traffic is just as
much a threat to the people as to the quack-quacks,” she said in an email. Honeycutt indicated that when the city
put out a traffic speed monitor earlier this year, it found that most of the cars did not exceed 35 miles per hour.
“But that’s too fast in an area where people are constantly crossing the road and looking at the sights instead of the
oncoming cars.”

Shad said the roads are for cars, not ducks. “I want to recognize the fact that we want to protect the little feathered guys as best we can, but at the end of the day we have priorities as a city and I rank the safety of ducks as not real high up there on the list,” Shad said. “I’ve lived in this area for 25 years and it’s sad to
see, but it’s a road next to a duck pond — it’s going to happen.”

He underscored that any improvements to the Duck Pond park would first be for the people who use it. Duck protection would be secondary.

“I haven’t heard of any great ideas that would make the ducks safe, but I have open ears,” Shad said. “We can’t move the road, we can’t move the pond. Do we get rid of all the ducks?”

Honeycutt said there are solutions. “I still hold to the notion that speed bumps or the grids in the road that make cars vibrate are the best solution,” she said. “Waking people up from their cell phones or radios is a good way to sober them up on approach.”