From Valerie the dachshund to Flaco the owl: the wildest animal escapes

In a world filled with dark, depressing news, the sight of a little sausage dog trotting across Australian scrubland has captured the internet’s attention. The picture is not remarkable in itself, but the back story is: the pooch in question is Valerie, a miniature dachshund who has been on the run on a remote Australian island for over 500 days.

Valerie went missing in November 2023 during a holiday on Kangaroo Island, south Australia. The dog’s owners, Josh Fishlock and Georgia Gardner, said that Valerie escaped from their campsite before disappearing into the bush. The couple were devastated and spent a week looking for her, to no avail.

Nothing was heard of Valerie until last month, when she was spotted 15 kilometres from where she first went missing by locals. The news astonished her owners. “She never left my side. She was not a very outside, rough-and-tough dog,” Gardner told The Guardian. “To think that she even went one night outside in the rain, oh my gosh. To think that she’s gone a year and a half is incredible.” Experts believe that Valerie has been subsisting on a diet of roadkill, birds, frogs and mice and drinking water from a local dam.

At this point, a local wildlife rescue group called Kangala decided to renew the hunt for Valerie. “She runs at the first sign of humans or vehicles and despite the best efforts of dedicated island locals, Valerie has been impossible to catch,” they wrote in a Facebook post. The team of volunteers began to set up surveillance cameras and lures in the area where Valerie was thought to be. They laid out roast chicken – Valerie’s favourite food – and dog treats in bait stations. After the cameras were going on the blink due to patchy 4G, a local donated a portable Starlink Wi-Fi dish.

Kangaroo Island is famous for its wildlife, and the Wildlife Rescue team said that the traps started attracting other animals: possums, wallabies, kangaroos and feral cats, making it more difficult to set a trap that would catch Valerie, and not a rogue possum. But the dachshund has started coming regularly to one of the traps, with night vision cameras picking up footage of her.

The Kangala team have now installed a remote control trigger system for the trap, and are waiting for Valerie to return. “We’re pretty excited at this point. It’s just a matter of time now,” said owner Georgia Gardner to a local news station.

Valerie is not the first animal to capture the world’s heart with a great escape. Here are some feathered friends who have paved the way.

Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl, became an unexpected fixture of New York City life after escaping from the Central Park Zoo in February 2023. The escape occurred after someone vandalised his enclosure, cutting through the mesh and allowing the bird to fly free.

Initially, there were concerns about Flaco’s ability to survive in the wild. Having spent over a decade in captivity, zoo officials questioned whether he would be able to hunt and navigate the urban environment. However, Flaco proved them wrong.

Within days, the owl was seen flying across Manhattan, and it became clear he was successfully hunting prey – mainly rats – within Central Park. He really did take in the city, and was spotted perched atop fire escapes in the Lower East Side and taking in the sights of a sculpture garden in the East Village.

Flaco quickly became a local celebrity. Birdwatchers gathered regularly to track his movements, and social media accounts dedicated to Flaco shared frequent updates.

Zoo officials eventually decided not to attempt to recapture him, acknowledging that he had adapted well to his new surroundings. He continued to roost in various parts of the city and remained at large for a year until tragedy struck, in the form of a building in the Upper West Side which Flaco flew into.

A subsequent necropsy conducted by the Bronx Zoo found that life-threatening levels of rat poison in his system and a severe pigeon virus also contributed to his death. New Yorkers mourned his death by laying flowers and pictures of owls beneath an oak in Central Park, which was Flaco’s favourite tree.

It’s a tale as old as time: American breaks out of prison and heads south to sunny Mexico. Except this time it was an African flamingo, and it only made it to Texas. Flamingo No.492, also known as Pink Floyd, escaped from Sedgwick county zoo in Wichita, Kansas way back in 2005 after keepers failed to clip its wings. No doubt buoyed by dreams of starting afresh, the flamingo flew to Texas and wound up at Lavaca Bay on the Gulf Coast.

Texas does not have any native flamingos, which could have been bad news for 492, as the birds are sociable creatures. But fate was on its side: soon after touching down in Texas, 492 befriended a Caribbean flamingo which was likely blown to the Gulf Coast by a tropical storm. The pair parted ways for unknown reasons, but 492 continued to thrive. It was last spotted in 2022 by a local fisherman.