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, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

“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.