Ravi the Red Panda Escaped Aussie Zoo to Hang Out in a Fig Tree

A red panda that escaped from an Australian zoo and went missing for two days was found Sunday in WELLINGTON, New Zealand, after being seen hanging out in a fig tree in a park nearby.

The 7-year-old red panda, known as Ravi, was transported from another zoo to Adelaide Zoo last week in the hopes that he would mate with Mishry, a female red panda. But Ravi has gone missing by Friday.

Director of Adelaide Zoo Phil Ainsley reported that zookeepers needed to spend Sunday trying in vain to persuade Ravi to leave the fig tree by offering him bamboo and sweet corn.

In the end, however, the team had to fire a tranquilizer dart.

Ainsley claimed that after attempting to penetrate him with several different dart devices, they only needed to wait for the drug to start working for about 15 minutes.

The zookeepers who have been waiting beneath the tree's canopy covered Ravi with their blankets.

According to Ainsley, Ravi is doing very well. After being on the run, he settles into an animal health hospital where he will only stay for the next two or three days. The zoo just wants to make sure that Ravi has recovered from his few days of adventure and is in good health.

Ainsley claimed they first looked inside the zoo, believing Ravi would be up one of the big trees there when they realized he had managed to escape his enclosure on Friday morning. He wasn't discovered in the fig tree in the neighboring botanic park until Sunday morning when a zookeeper did.

To determine how Ravi escaped, Ainsley stated that they would be looking at the zoo's CCTV footage.

He was most probably testing his enclosure because he had just arrived at the zoo and it was a new environment. Red pandas are best known for being escapologists and are incredibly agile, according to Ainsley, who also said that the zoo is cognizant of this, New York Post reports.

Red Pandas

Red pandas, which are remarkable acrobats who climb or swing on tree branches in their Asian forest habitats, are just about the size of a common house cat and once prompted a raging debate about their connection to giant pandas. Taxonomists previously classified them as members of the bear and raccoon families, but DNA analysis later demonstrated that they belong to their own distinct family, which is Ailuridae, and genus, which is Ailurus.

Growing evidence indicates that the Chinese red panda and the Himalayan red panda, once believed to be two separate species, may be one species. The fluffy tail of the Chinese red panda has more distinct rings and is a little bit bigger.

Red pandas are found in Nepal, Bhutan, India, northern Myanmar (Burma), and central China's wet mountain forests. They spend the majority of their time sleeping and sunbathing in trees.

These animals have done an amazing job of adapting to their surroundings: They have flexible ankles that allow them to climb down trees headfirst. The Red pandas also have semi-retractable claws that are very sharp and help them grip slick branches. With their coats matching the moss clumps that sprout on their tree homes and their black bellies making it challenging for predators to locate them from the ground, they can flee from jackals and snow leopards, which may find it difficult to see the animals in the first place.

Red pandas use their long tail like a wraparound blanket. To add to that, they have two layers of fur, which is a soft undercoat covered in coarse hairs, to protect them from the mountain chill.