Two brown bears broke out of their pen. Then they ransacked the honey stash

Mish and Lucy, two European brown bears, sitting in their enclosure in Devon, England. Photo / Courtesy of the Wildwood Trust via The New York Times

Mish and Lucy, 5-year-old siblings, escaped their enclosure at a wildlife sanctuary in Devon, England. Only honey was in danger.

Mish and Lucy are friendly and easygoing siblings. They get along well. This time of year, they primarily hang out in their enclosure eating fruits, nuts and honey.

But on Monday, the pair of 5-year-old bears broke out of their living quarters at a wildlife sanctuary in Devon, in southwestern England, and helped themselves to a stockpile of fresh food.

And in a scene that could’ve been pulled straight from Winnie the Pooh, the bears devoured a week’s worth of honey in about an hour.

Mark Habben, the director of zoological operations at Wildwood Trust, which operates the sanctuary, said he received a call Monday afternoon informing him of a “code red” at the organisation’s Devon location. (At the time, he was working at Wildwood Trust’s other location in Kent, a roughly four-hour drive away.)

Habben said he first thought it might be a drill. But when he realised it was a genuine alert, he said, the sanctuary enacted its emergency protocol, taking 16 guests into a play barn for safety and calling the police. None of the visitors were at risk, he said, and the bears were not in a public area.

Mish was the first of the two bears to get into the area where their food is kept, Habben said, including honey and peanut butter used to reward the bears.

Mish tired himself out and decided after nearly an hour that he wanted to go back to bed, Habben said, and the bear returned to his enclosure.

Workers at the sanctuary then coaxed Lucy to follow her brother back to the enclosure by ringing a bell, ending their brief adventure.

On Tuesday, Habben was at the sanctuary, Wildwood Devon, to conduct an investigation into how the bears escaped. Since there was no damage to the door of their enclosure, he said, it was probably an “operational error somewhere along the way”.

Mish and Lucy weren’t always lounging in Devon with plentiful supplies of honey. They were rescued as cubs from the Albanian mountains, Habben said, where their mother abandoned them. The Romanian chapter of the World Wide Fund for Nature tried to release the cubs back into the wild, but they had grown too attached to the humans who had rescued them, Habben said.

Instead, they were taken in four years ago by Wildwood Trust, a conservation organisation “dedicated to restoring the balance between people and wildlife,” according to its website.

Mish and Lucy are European brown bears, which can be found along large swathes of northern Europe, as well as in Albania, Romania, and some forest regions of Germany. While brown bears were once found in the wild in Britain, they have not been for more than 1000 years.

Romania has the largest share of European brown bears on the Continent. The country’s forestry research institute estimated the population to be about 13,000 this year, though the Fund for Nature disputed that count, saying it may be too high.

Mish and Lucy, safely back in their enclosure, have resumed their normal daily routine. “They spend a lot of time around the animal keeper team,” Habben said. “They like to come over to see what we’re doing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Claire Moses

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