Toronto hatches midnight plan to lure back escaped capybaras

[Toronto Mayor John Tory, centre, and Coun. Sarah Doucette, left, looking at Chewy, the older capybara, at the High Park Zoo on Wednesday. TWITTER]

Toronto’s parks department has hatched a midnight plan to catch two capybaras that escaped a day earlier and become an Internet sensation.

The young capybaras escaped the High Park Zoo in the city’s west end on Tuesday morning, leaving behind a lone (and lonely) male companion called Chewy.

“Because they’re so shy and they’re so skittish, it’s highly unlikely they’re going to come out in the daytime,” Megan Price, projects and policy advisor for the city’s parks department, tells Yahoo Canada News.

The media attention the missing rodents has attracted to High Park, coupled with the public interest in the search and the general activity to the park on a warm day, means that the timid animals are unlikely to venture back to the pen during the day, Price says.

“What we’re going to do is essentially set a trap for them for tonight because when it’s quiet and dark it’s more likely that they’ll come up,” she says.

That trap involves hiding Chewy and leaving the gate to the animals’ pen open. Food left out and a recording of the clicking noises made by the animals will hopefully lure the male-and-female capybara pair back home, where High Park Zoo staffers will be waiting to make sure they stay there.

“We’ll entice the capybara into that pen, where there’s fruit and vegetables and corn on the cob, which is one of their favourites,” says Sarah Doucette, city councillor for the ward that contains High Park Zoo. “And if all goes according to plan we’ll just close the gate on them.”

They’ve selected foods that they know Chewy likes, and that can’t be found around the park, in the hopes of attracting the missing animals, Doucette says, but given that capybara will eat both aquatic and land vegetation they have no reason to believe they’re going hungry right now.

Rodents on the run

The young capybaras were being introduced to their new enclosure as a breeding pair when they got out early Tuesday morning. They came from Texas through a wildlife broker in Ontario, Price says. In the process the two animals — now dubbed Bonnie and Clyde — got loose, leaving the older Chewy behind.

The pair has since become an online sensation.

“I don’t know the details of the prison break or what they did to deserve zoo incarceration but I’m rooting for the #capybara #freedom,” tweeted Hockey Night in Canada host George Stroumboloupoulos.

Even Toronto Mayor John Tory got involved, considering the feelings of the abandoned Chewy on Twitter.

And according to photo evidence posted on Twitter, visits to several Toronto newsrooms by a different, non-escaped capybara ironically halted all activity by reporters covering the escaped rodents.

Capybaras are large rodents, in fact the largest animals in the rodent family. They look something like guinea pigs, if guinea pigs could grow to be as much as 150 pounds.

Fortunately, the missing Toronto capybaras are only about six months old and weigh about 30 pounds each- — about the size of a French bulldog, Price says. But unfortunately they also look something like groundhogs, and the city has received several tips of capybara sightings that turned out to be the less-exciting mammal instead.

“The difference with a capybara is when it walks you actually see its feet,” Doucette says. “It’s got quite long legs.” With a groundhog the feet aren’t as visible.

The animals’ native habitat is in the savannahs and forests of South America, which is a far cry from the busy streets of Toronto’s west end. They like to live near bodies of water, and they are herbivores that eat mostly grasses and aquatic plants.

Given that capybaras are a social species and tend to live in groups of 10 to 20 animals, the one rodent left behind at the zoo might be feeling a bit lonely. One of the escapees was sighted by a resident on the side of the enclosure pen at about 9:45 p.m. on Tuesday evening, Price says. The sighting was reported to 311, but the capybara ran off before city staff could arrive.

“Down in the zoo, most of the morning we noticed that the capybara we have now is making noises and we believe that he may be calling out to them,” Coun. Doucette said of Chewy.

But because the large rodents can stay still and silent underwater for hours — they stick only their noses out of the water — they continue to evade searchers. The plan is to keep up the evening trap setting until it works, Doucette says, which may require some patience on the city’s part.

Both Ducette and Price mentioned last summer’s bird escape from the same zoo, when a male peacock spent about a week on the lam.

“They’re quite skittish,” Price says. “If they don’t come back tonight it might take a couple of days. It took the peacock a few days before he got his fill.”