Wallaby captured in NW Pa.

Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE SPRINGS, Pa.

If you’re missing a wallaby, the Pennsylvania Game Commission wants to talk to you.

Commission officials say a wallaby — an animal resembling a small kangaroo — was captured Wednesday in Crawford County in northwestern Pennsylvania.

The 25-pound male was tranquilized near Cambridge Springs and taken to the Pymatuning Deer Park in Jamestown, where it will remain until the owner is found.

Officials said a former commission biologist aide reported that her landlord had seen the animal.

Eugene Morton, senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, told the Erie Times-News that he “broke up in laughter” when heard the student’s story.

He and others who use the Hemlock Hill Biological Research Area in Rockdale Township are more accustomed to seeing birds than marsupials native to Australia and surrounding islands.

But he says he wasn’t laughing the next day when he and another student spotted the wallaby hopping around.

“I got out slowly. It didn’t like the car, and it hopped over to an old cemetery,” Morton said. “I watched it, and it sort of watched me.”

While the other student took photos, Morton said, he went to the house to find the student who originally reported the sighting.

“I wanted to tell the girl she was not crazy,” he said.

In Pennsylvania, wallaby owners are required to have a license to keep exotic animals, but officials said no one has reported such an animal missing.

But officials told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the wallaby could have strayed in from Ohio 30 miles to the west, where a permit to keep such animals isn’t needed.