With a pair of bears on the loose, police were called and a firearms unit dispatched to the wildlife park in southwest England.
But the panic was quickly quelled when Mish and Lucy were found fast asleep in the honey store Monday, having eaten a week's worth of stocks of the sweet treat at Wildwood Devon.
The siblings managed to get out through a back door which had been left open while staff were working with vehicles inside, Mark Habben, the park’s director of zoological operations, said in a phone interview Wednesday.
“They weren’t in the public space, but they were out of their enclosure in the staff areas, just wandering around,” he said.
With their newfound freedom, and sense of smell 2,000 times higher than humans, they made their way to the kitchen.
“We had a fresh food delivery with all the fruit and vegetables just an hour before they escaped,” Habben said of the supplies that would’ve otherwise lasted four days. “They ate all of the bananas, apples, fresh food and the vegetables,” he said.
The siblings then found honey jars in the area where the staff prepares meals for them and “ate about a week’s worth,” he said.
“They’ve got an amazing sense of smell, so they just wandered around looking for their favorite food items, and then they fell asleep,” he said.
Mish and Lucy’s escape prompted an emergency evacuation throughout the park and the deployment of a firearms response team supported by the local police, Habben said.
He said that there was never any danger of the bears being shot “because the bears were very, very calm,” adding that nobody was injured.
“All they wanted to do was take themselves back in the end,” he said.
After an hour of rummaging for snacks, Mish, who weighs about 400 pounds, just walked back into the enclosure, and Lucy, who weighs about 300 pounds, ran back inside after the keepers rang a bell that the bears were trained to follow, Habben said.
The European brown bears were rescued as cubs from a snow drift in Albania in 2019, Habben said. Originally they were supposed to be released in Romania but when that didn’t work, Wildwood built a “bespoke forest home” for the pair, he added.
“They’re just really inquisitive, really friendly and a lot of fun,” he said. “They are very intrigued by everything.”
