The morning after Sunny made her great escape, the exhaustive search began.
3 Months Ago
4 Months Ago
5 Months Ago
There were drones. Infrared cameras. A police K-9 unit. A dedicated hotline. Teams of volunteers searched through parks, streets and cemeteries.
And still, nothing. Over two weeks, the search for Sunny, a 19-month-old red panda who lived at the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk, has so far turned up little more than a few wrongly identified raccoons.
"That red panda is an outlier," said Rob Vernon, spokesman for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, a nonprofit organization that represents 215 facilities in the United States, including all of the country’s major metropolitan zoos. It’s rare for animals to escape, he said, estimating the number at about half a dozen per year, although no official data is kept.
He said it was "especially unusual for an animal to be gone for an extended period of time."
That could be why Sunny has attracted so much attention. "The response from the community has been overwhelmingly supportive," said Ashley Grove Mars, a Virginia Zoo marketing manager, in an email. Well-wishers have flocked to a Virginia Zoo blog to follow the twists and turns in this high-stakes chase.
The members of the association take special precautions to make sure animals don’t escape captivity. At least once a year, for example, they’re required to run drills on responding when a creature disappears.
The numbers are spottier for zoos not accredited by the association. The U.S. Department of Agriculture lists about 2,400 "animal exhibitor" license holders in the country. That number includes zoos, circuses, petting farms and similar facilities. They do not have to report when an animal escapes.
As Sunny has shown, even the most well-regulated zoos have occasional escapes. In most cases, animals don’t roam far from their enclosures, Vernon said, and many return on their own.
"A lot of times when animals realize they’re out of their space, they suddenly hunker down like they’re saying, ‘I’m not sure I’m supposed to be here!’ " he said. "And then they go right back home, where they’re comfortable."
He pointed to Ollie, a bobcat who spent just a couple of days missing from the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington. She was found last week, right in front of the zoo’s bird exhibit. That same zoo had also misplaced its own red panda — this one a male, named Rusty — in 2013, but only for a day.
With her two-week run of freedom, Sunny is on track to join a pantheon of legendary animals who have staged their own versions of the movie Madagascar.
These include the Bonnie and Clyde of capybaras — a type of huge rodent — who fled together from Toronto’s High Park Zoo during a transfer in May last year and stayed on the lam for weeks.
Or the Jesse James of lynxes, a culprit named Flaviu, who escaped from Dartmoor Zoological Park in Devon County, England, in July and roamed free for three weeks. The Telegraph reported that he killed four lambs during his sojourn.
Or one particularly crafty mammal from the annals of history: the Harry Houdini of orangutans, with the unassuming name of Ken Allen, who rose to fame in the 1980s for escaping the San Diego Zoo not once, not twice, but thrice — sometimes colluding with other primates. Having achieved heroic status, Ken Allen was mourned by San Diego when he died in 2000, the Associated Press reported at the time.
If she continues to elude zoo staff and the concerned citizenry of Norfolk, Sunny could become the next cage-busting creature of legend.
Red pandas, who eat bamboo and roam wild in the eastern Himalayas, are an endangered species, with less than 10,000 on earth.
But Greg Bockheim, the Virginia Zoo’s executive director, said last month that Sunny should be able to survive because the local weather was cool and wet. And if she’s still hiding somewhere near the premises, bamboo is plentiful around the zoo.
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