Just before 8am, a staff member arriving at Federation University's SMB Campus on Albert Street noticed a distraught mother duck pacing outside the building.

She was so distressed that she was crashing into the glass door at the front of the building.

Realising something was wrong and that the mother duck had potentially lost her ducklings, staff at the Workshop Cafe starting calling around for help.

Workshop Cafe owner Meg Boschert said she called numerous numbers for help and eventually came into contact with Emma from Badgar Wildlife Rescue, who rushed over.

"We could hear the ducklings but we couldn't see them," Ms Boschert said.

After a few hours searching the campus and looking in drains, a customer of the cafe found a tiny duckling, believed to only be about 24 hours old, being swooped by a magpie at the front of the cafe.

"A magpie was trying to swoop it and take it away," Ms Boschert said. "So we captured it and put it in a little container until we found its family."

Then police working at the Police Assistance Line upstairs spied a group of ducklings stranded on the adjacent roof.

The next problem to solve was how to reach the ducklings, on a very wet and windy morning.

The solution arrived in the form of another customer - a plumber - who dropped in to pick up a coffee and asked why everyone was staring at the roof next door.

He owned a harness and was able to retrieve it, buckle up, clamber onto the roof and rescue a further four ducklings.

It's believed the mother duck may have nested on the roof and the ducklings - Pacific Black Ducks - had only recently hatched within the last 24 hours.

Ms Boschert said it was really nice for the cafe community, their customers and others to work together to rescue the ducklings.

About 1pm, the mother duck and ducklings were walked down the street and released at a nearby creek.

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