Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? In Devon, England, two escaped European brown bears named Mish and Lucy saw a whole lot of honey and claimed it as their own. The BBC reports that the pair somehow got out of their enclosure at the Wildwood Devon sanctuary on Monday, then sauntered over to the site's food store, where they proceeded to literally dip their paws into the honeypots there, eating what officials say was "a week's worth of honey" in one sitting.
During the bears' brief bout of freedom that started around 3pm, 16 children were hustled into a secure building during a "code red" operation as cops and park staff tried to wrangle the 400-pound bears, both 5 years old, back into captivity. "They were wandering up and down, having a sniff around, looking in the store cupboard where honey was stored," says Mark Habben, director of zoological operations at Wildwood Trust, which oversees the park. That cupboard "was fortuitously left open, so they raided that." The New York Times reports it took the bears, said to be siblings, only an hour or so to scarf down all of that newly found sweet treat.
Mish eventually found her way back to the bears' pen on her own, while Lucy had to be cajoled back with treats and a bell. The bears, who'd been rescued from a pile of snow in Albania in 2019, were the first "escape incident" at the park, per Habben, who says that the public wasn't in danger during the hubbub. "The bears were continuously monitored both on the ground and via CCTV" until they were back in their enclosure, the park said, per the Guardian. An investigation is ongoing as to how the bears escaped, as there was no damage to the door of their enclosure. Habben is chalking up the breakout to what was likely an "operational error somewhere along the way," per the Times. (More bears stories.)
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