Hastings teacher’s lucky duck surprise after driving incident

Hastings teacher Denise Haronga unwittingly carried a duck around in her car's front bumper for several days. Composite image

There are duck tales and then there’s this.

Denise Haronga, from Hastings, was driving back to Hawke’s Bay from Palmerston North last Sunday and travelling at about 100km/h.

Driving around a corner “somewhere between Ashhurst and Dannevirke”, Haronga was suddenly face to beak with a duck on the road and had no time to swerve to avoid it.

“There was nothing I could’ve done,” Haronga told The Adam and Megan Podcast on The Hits Hawke’s Bay on Friday morning.

“There was no safe place to pull over or to check and so we continued, and I kind of forgot about it.”

Cut to Wednesday morning, three days later, when Haronga, a teacher at Mahora School, received a video in her work group chat of a live duck in the front bumper of a car that looked like her vehicle.

“I went, ‘what the blazers?’,” she said.

In the video, the duck appeared relatively happily tucked into the odd location, while a young student remarked, “I love nature”.

Not being great with birds at the best of times, Haronga called an ex-workmate who is a duck hunter.

“But it turned out that as a duck hunter, he doesn’t like live birds,” she laughed.

Fortunately, a school office worker rang the SPCA, which sent someone to collect the duck and take it to a vet.

The bird was checked by a vet and, remarkably, the lucky duck had no injuries.

The SPCA was able to release it back to the wild near where it hitched a ride with Haronga.

Haronga said she was still shocked that she never saw or heard the duck while walking around her car.

“The people I work with, they laughed at me because I hadn’t seen it,” she said.

“It just never reared its ugly head.”

Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in Auckland, London, Berlin, and Napier.