Catch-and-release fundraiser taking lake by storm
Story by Paul South
Submitted Photos
From majestic American Bald Eagles to elegant Great Egrets, Canada geese and Great Blue Herons, Logan Martin Lake is a bird-lovers paradise.
But perhaps the lake’s most popular bird these days, save maybe chicken on the grill, doesn’t have a single feather. In fact, it’s best known as a toddler’s iconic bathtub buddy. Submitted for your approval – the rubber duck.
Thanks to Stacy Deegan and her late husband Brian, the shores of Logan Martin teem with the hidden non-feathered friends. It’s the hottest scavenger hunt this side of summer camp, as folks comb the area for the numbered ducks, take a selfie with their find for posting on Facebook, then hide them again for another hunter to discover.
It’s a fun twist on catch and release.
Every duck is tagged with instructions. Take a photo of the foundling, post it on the hunt’s Facebook page, then re-hide it for another hunter to find. It’s a year-round event, so it’s always rubber duck season.
Known officially as the Logan Martin Duck Hunt, it’s a Facebook group the Deegans hatched in 2023 to track the movements of the rubber quackers. Stacy took the notion a step further with the scavenger hunt. They began with 10 numbered ducks. The first duck was hidden near Pier 59.
“We just got in the truck one day and started driving around the lake looking for public places to hide the ducks,” she said. “The first place we hid one was the Pier 59 boat ramp. We just kept driving around and hiding the ducks and created the Facebook group.”
The couple had so much fun, they started hiding more ducks. Each toy bird has a QR code that can be scanned, and the discovered duck’s image goes straight to Facebook.
Brian Deegan passed away last year, but Stacy continued the hunt, she said, “not as a tribute to him, but I did release some ducks that had tags with ‘In Memory of Brian Deegan’ and his dates. So, I had a round of memorial releases there.”
The Duck Hunt has been on for two years, and the number of toy ducks has grown to nearly 500. They come in all colors.
“It’s been so much fun,” Stacy said. “My neighbors have been helping me out with the ducks.” And this year, there’s a new wrinkle that’s – as they might say in The Hamptons – just ducky.
There are golden ducks secreted away – 14 of them – and whoever discovers one wins a prize. “I was able to get some local businesses to donate prizes,” Stacy said.
For example, Lakeside Candle Co., Pell City Coffee and Pier 59 are among the donors, as well as Porky Pirate Barbecue. One local Realtor is offering a cash prize for her firm’s gold duck, Deegan said.
In another ducky development, the Duck Hunt will be part of the fourth Boo Bash event this year. “It’s just another leg (of the hunt),” Deegan said. “It’s another way to have the ducks out for people to have fun with it.”
Five of the Boo Bash quackers will have prizes worth $100 for the finders, thanks again to donations from local businesses.
Like Boo Bash, the wildly popular Halloween hullaballoo, the Duck Hunt aims to build a stronger sense of community on Logan Martin.
But it also takes a page from a social phenomenon called geocaching. According to geocaching.com, it’s “an any day, any time activity that can take you to amazing and beautiful places. Geocaches are physical containers hidden all over the world you can find from a set of coordinates.” There is a Geocaching app. For more information, visit geocaching.com.
“It’s a really cool idea,” Stacy said. “It’s getting families to get outside and get away from their phones and computers and get on the hiking trails and look for hidden treasures or hidden caches. People all over the world hide things everywhere that you don’t know about.”
She added, “Geocaching is what inspired me to hide the ducks and get people outside to look for something fun. Just something extra, especially on the lake, where there’s already plenty to do.
“But I just imagine the smile on a kid’s face when they are running out of Tiki Hut, and they find a little rubber duck.”
In an effort to be sensitive to the lake environment, Stacy intentionally conceals the ducks in areas where the rubber creatures can’t slide into the water.
“The idea is to not have them fall into the water and float away,” she said. “I made a conscious choice in the beginning not to place the ducks in the water.”
The end goal of the Duck Hunt? Good old-fashioned fun and a ton of smiles.
“Just something to put a smile on somebody’s face,” Stacy said. “I usually tell people, enjoy for a minute, then re-hide it for someone else to find.”
She hopes the hunt will become a Logan Martin mainstay. Globally, the rubber ducks are enjoying a renaissance and have waddled out of the tub, so to speak. Many Jeep owners have dashboard rubber ducks. In the UK, there’s a whole store devoted to the beloved toy.
Once, Brian Deegan concealed 50 tiny ducks throughout the family’s Logan Martin house.
“I would love to do it as long as I can. The rubber ducks are not expensive at all. I just do it for fun. If it were expensive, I’d probably try to monetize it. But I don’t want to monetize it. I just want it to be fun. As long as I’m financially able to put these little ducks together and hide them for people, and they enjoy it, I’m going to do it.”
Every duck find posted on Facebook is an affirmation. “Every time someone finds a duck and posts it,” Stacy said, “that’s my reward.”
For more information, follow the Logan Martin Duck Hunt (Rubber Ducks) Facebook Page.
