Detroit Zoo Officials Think Their Missing Wallaby Was Snatched by a Raptor

The Detroit Zoo’s 5-month-old wallaby joey went missing over the weekend, and yesterday zoo officers advised a haunting doable rationalization: that the younger marsupial could have been plucked out of its enclosure by a hen of prey.

The red-necked wallaby (Notamacropus rufogriseous) is a small marsupial species native to jap Australia and Tasmania. Marsupials are born prematurely and end their improvement inside their mom’s pouch, solely venturing out when they’re developed sufficient.

The joey vanished from a 2-acre habitat within the Detroit Zoo’s Australian Outback Adventure, which hosts 11 kangaroos and wallabies. Sprocket, the joey’s 4-year-old mom, additionally lives within the enclosure. At 5 (or 6—the zoo isn’t fairly certain) months previous, the joey was simply beginning to spend time exterior of Sprocket’s pouch, in keeping with a Detroit Zoo Facebook submit shared simply two days earlier than the animal’s disappearance. It was final seen in its enclosure on Saturday afternoon.

The animal was about rabbit-sized, making it very engaging fodder for the owls and hawks that stay close to the zoo. “At this time, we believe it is likely one of these aerial predators was involved,” officers mentioned in a Facebook post.

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“We have surveillance cameras in a number of places in the zoo, and our security team is reviewing surveillance footage,” Scott Carter, the chief life science officer with the Detroit Zoological Society, told FOX 2 Detroit. “We also have trail cameras in a number of places.”

It’s not extraordinary for zoos to lose animals of their care. Last October, Gladys, an enormous Eurasian eagle-owl, escaped her Minnesota Zoo enclosure. Gladys was later discovered critically injured by a close-by roadside and died, however not earlier than tasting freedom and, apparently, a cat on somebody’s roof.

Birds of prey will typically go after animals that aren’t their ordinary prey, together with small canine and cats. You could even recall a viral video of an eagle making an attempt to pluck a human child off a golf course; fortunately, in that case, the eagle left empty-taloned.

More: Scientists Figured Out Which Animals Were in a Zoo Just by Taking DNA From the Air