Best Friends FOR LIFE

Richard Loudest alarm

LAST APRIL, CRYSTAL MCKIBBEN drove to a nearby poultry farm to pick up three ducklings, but she returned home with two ducklings and a full-grown duck instead. McKibben’s husband, Josh, wasn’t sure what he thought about a full-grown duck, since they didn’t have a coop yet, but Crystal had no intention of taking the duck back to the poultry farmer because he’d told her that he planned to take the duck to a butcher.

They named the duck Richard, but after a few weeks, Richard did something very strange: laid an egg.

“Richard is not a male,” McKibben concluded. Whoops!

Now Richard lays an egg a day, and each one is in high demand by the McKibbens’ 3-year-old son, Henry.

Richard recently earned the uno cial title of best guard duck in the neighborhood after waking Crystal with her raucous quacking.

“She is so loud that she woke me up at 2:30 in the morning,” Crystal recalls. “I went outside to see what was going on, and there was a giant bobcat prowling around the coop, and Richard was not happy about it.”

The bobcat ran o when Crystal went outside but came back a couple of hours later.

“We didn’t know what to do, so the next day we called [wildlife control], and a man came out and gave us some pointers on how to Fort Knox the coop down.”

Richard is an Indian runner duck, so she’s exceptionally tall. Like most ducks, Richard loves the water, so she spends her weekends splashing around a kiddie pool in the backyard. When she’s not doing that, she’s enjoying her favorite snack of frozen peas, or prowling for insects, spiders and snakes in the yard.

Jonny

Most talented escape artist

VERENA MAHLOW LAGE DIDN’T WANT A DOG.

A native of Mainz, Germany, the TV freelancer sought refuge from her country’s frigid winter weather by taking her son to Ibiza, Spain. Her son’s cat had just died, and he pleaded for a dog. Reluctantly, Mahlow Lage took him to the island’s rescue center, where 6-week-old Jonny, an English pointer/Ibizan hound mix, immediately wooed her.

When Jonny’s person met her future husband in 2004, Jonny immediately loved him something Mahlow Lage says finalized her decision to marry. In 2011 Mahlow Lage decided to move to Little Forest Hills to be with her husband. Mahlow Lage planned to make the eight-hour flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to New York, and then drive to Dallas with a close friend of hers for a “mini road-trip vacation.” This would in turn reduce the time Jonny spent on the plane, and provide him with his favorite thrill — riding in cars.

But when Mahlow Lage’s plane landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport, an airline employee informed her that Jonny had escaped his kennel and gotten loose on the tarmac. “The airplanes couldn’t land or take o ,” she says.

Mahlow Lage searched the entire airport to no avail. Later that night she sat in her hotel and cried for hours. She couldn’t sleep or eat. Her heart was broken.

In the morning, just as her husband was on a plane headed from Dallas to New York to help, Mahlow Lage received a phone call from a neighboring suburb. A man found Jonny the night before while dropping a friend o at the airport. He spotted the dog sitting in front of the tarmac, collarless, and decided to take him home for company. But Jonny whined throughout the entire night, so the man took him to the vet to see if he endured damage to his paws from the tarmac.

“The vet said, ‘He is not hurt, he is missing somebody,’ ” Mahlow Lage says.

The vet then found a microchip in Jonny’s neck and called the police to help locate his owner. Thirty hours after Jonny first boarded the plane, Mahlow Lage found him in an apartment near the airport on Passover. Mahlow Lage, who is half-Jewish, smiled when the man, who was also Jewish, told her it was a miracle of Passover.

“It was, but it was also just a miracle overall,” she says.