ST. PAUL — For the third straight year, St. Paul residents have had to rescue newborn ducklings from the same street drain where hatchlings always seem to fall.

Each year a mother duck — apparently the same one — hatches her brood on someone’s lawn. But as she leads them toward a golf course across the street the ducklings inevitably fall one by one through the grate, reports said.

“Why on God’s given earth do they do this every year?” resident Janet Syring asked. “(The ducks) go over the same gutter and fall down.”

In what has become an annual ritual, residents fish the peeping ducklings out of the gutter.

Fourteen ducklings hatched Thursday and ended up in the same grate. They weren’t found until Saturday, when Trish Pearson, whose parents live nearby, heard them chirping. She and other neighbors, along with firefighters, herded the ducklings into an area where they could be grabbed using bare hands and a rake.

It took 2 1/2 hours to retrieve 11 ducklings. Two others had died, and the last one eluded rescuers’ efforts for another 30 minutes until Nikki Syring, Janet Syring’s daughter-in-law, managed to grab it.

With tears in her eyes, Nikki Syring placed it in the bucket with the other hatchlings.

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

The mother duck was nowhere to be seen during the rescue, and residents were preparing to drop off the ducklings at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in St. Paul.

But the mother, who has apparently learned to wait nearby, returned with a male duck 30 minutes later. Both waddled toward the gutter.

Pearson took the bucket of ducklings and cautiously approached the mother. She poured the babies gently onto the ground, where they stumbled briefly and then raced to the mother with a chorus of peeps.

The mother and male duck rushed toward them. Then the group turned and waddled toward the golf course as residents watched with satisfaction.