When Steve Lehrke returned from breakfast with his wife Sue to their southeast Carson City home Sunday morning, he had no idea he was about to become a hero.
Across the street from his house, a male and female quail were chattering and seemed to be pacing frantically around a storm drain.
"I said to myself, 'That's not right,'" Lehrke said, so he decided to do some investigating.
"As I got closer, I could hear all these little peeps, and then I saw that there were a bunch of baby quail that had fallen into the drain," he said.
Lehrke called several agencies and no one was available to help, so he decided something had to be done.
"I thought, 'I can't just walk away from this,' so I rigged up a plastic cup with some string and dropped it down into the drain from the curb side and used the end of a broom to herd them into the cup one at a time," Lehrke said.
"I brought seven of them up one by one and put them down into the rocks," he said.
He said he had noticed the mother running a wide arc in the street, but when he had rescued about two-thirds of the quail, he couldn't see the parents at all. A bit later, he saw the pair running around across the street in his yard calling the babies.
"The babies all perked up then, ran to the parents, and they were all reunited," he said.
The day following the episode, Lehrke said he was pleased with how things turned out.
"Even today I feel good about it," he said Monday. "I saved a family."