California Highway Patrol dispatchers in Santa Cruz are used to fielding calls about loose dogs, cats and the occasional deer wandering onto roadways. An emu weaving through traffic near Harper Street and 17th Avenue was, by the agency's own account, a new one.
The bird got loose from its owner's property earlier in the week of Oct. 12, according to SFist's report, and was spotted darting in and out of lanes of traffic. CHP's Santa Cruz office said it received multiple calls from drivers about the bird before troopers responded. The agency's public Facebook update, cited by both SFist and a follow-up dispatch from UPI on Oct. 16, put it plainly:
While we often deal with dogs, cats, deer, and occasionally birds, an emu was unexpected.
Santa Cruz CHP, Facebook
Emus can stand close to six feet tall and run in bursts above 30 mph, which makes a loose one in traffic a genuine hazard rather than a purely comic one — both to drivers who might swerve and to the flightless bird itself, which has no road sense to speak of. Troopers were able to corral the animal only after its owner arrived on scene to help direct it; no injuries to the bird, officers or motorists were reported.
The owner was reunited with the emu, which was walked back to its enclosure, and CHP closed out the incident without citations mentioned in either account. Neither report has named the owner or explained exactly how the bird escaped its property.
It joins a small but recurring genre of American local news: large flightless birds loose on public roads. Emus have previously stopped traffic on highways in Arizona, Maryland and New Mexico in past years, usually ending the same way — a patient standoff, a worried owner, and a dash of local-news comic relief. Santa Cruz's version drew national pickup mainly for the mundane understatement of the CHP's own post, less a drama than a shrug with a punchline.
There is no indication the bird will make a repeat appearance, though CHP's Santa Cruz unit may now have a new line item for its list of "unusual calls" the next time a resident keeps backyard poultry on the larger side.
