SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – A red panda at the San Diego Zoo managed to briefly escape from an enclosure over the weekend.
Allison Fortson was at the zoo on Jan. 29 when she said she saw a female red panda make a getaway from its Panda Canyon habitat by climbing a tree next to it.
As she started recording the situation, Fortson spotted what she described as an unusual number of zookeepers working to get the red panda down. She believes her group was one of the very few to realize what was going on.
"Another zoo security officer came up and said, 'Hey, we need to escort you off this bridge, you can't be here.' At that point, I was like, ‘No one else really knows what's going on here.’ So, I took to Reddit and said, ‘I'm at the zoo and the red panda escaped.' And it got a ton of traction,” Fortson said.
Zoo officials confirmed in a statement that specialists were monitoring the red panda until she came down from the tree on her own after about six hours. Officials said the habitat, which houses four red pandas, would be reviewed.
Zoo officials added that red pandas are “well adapted to climbing.”
