“Five little ducks went out one day, over the hills and far away,” goes the words of the old nursery rhyme – but a Loughrea pre-school this week saw double that number of ducklings arrive at their door . . . apparently out of nowhere!

Teacher Irene Shiel Leahy could scarcely believe her eyes on Tuesday morning last as she opened the doors of her Loughrea Community Pre-School in preparation for another normal day of class — or so she thought — for the 16 pupils attending.

“I just had the doors open around 9.30am when I looked out and saw a duck in the schoolyard with ten little ducklings trailing behind her.

“The schoolyard is completely enclosed so I couldn’t figure out how they had got in as the ducklings looked as if they had been just hatched,” Irene Shiel Leahy told the Connacht Tribune.

She eventually came to the conclusions that the wild duck — probably a mallard — had nested and hatched out her brood in a small ‘hidden area’ behind a shed in the schoolyard.

The pre-school class of 16 boys and girls — all in the three-to-five-years age bracket — had never seen anything like this before when they arrived for class shortly before 10am.

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