Mary Ellen Engert will be quick to tell you that it was she who started feeding the ducks that live in the pond on Road’s End.

          She started feeding them in the spring after she moved to Boothbay Harbor in 1985. They didn’t fly south for the winter.

          “We named the first two Nick and Nora. They would come in the house with a dishwasher going and the dogs out,” she said of the brazen birds.

          A few of her neighbors, including the Durfees, Dave and Kathy Bean, Maggie Griffin and Mike Tomko, joined in.

          They recall how Jean Durfee would stock up on food to sustain the ducks through the winter. “She used to have so many bags of cracked corn feed in the garage that she had to park outside,” Tomko said.

          Tomko is very involved in the community. He has been a member of the Boothbay Harbor Planning Board since 2008, serving as chairman since 2010, as well as a member of the Coastal Hazards-Sea Level Rise Oversight Committee and several other committees and boards in the region.

          He is interested in raising awareness about the pond locally and making it more accessible to tourists looking to see its year-round inhabitants.

          The Road’s End community also wants Boothbay’s residents and tourists to know that feeding the ducks is a year-round job. “If you’re gonna put that in the paper, you can tell them that they get hungry in the winter, too,” Engert laughed. “And they love bread!”

          There have been times when the pond has been full of ducks, but only about 30 ducks made the pond their home this winter, and now that summer’s here, 17 remain – 16 males and one female – along with two ducklings. Tomko recalled a year when there were two broods, one of nine and one of 11, all of which lived to be fully mature ducks.

          “I used to stand here and put the cracked corn up from the bank of the pond over my shoes and the ducklings used to come up and eat right off of my feet,” Tomko said.

          Everyone in the neighborhood has stories about the ducks coming up to their houses and patiently waiting to be fed, as well as the touching personal anecdotes that only result from the intersection of nature and small-town life.

          “We love them, it’s as simple as that,” Engert said, a statement reiterated by a large sign on the side of the road, put there to warn cars to slow down. Tomko made the current sign this year to replace the ones the Beans had used before.

            “Everybody comes down the street pretty carefully because they don’t want to be the ones to knock a duck and see one of us come unglued,” Engert said