Elusive emu captured after several days on the loose

An emu that was on the loose in Lakeville has been taken into custody.Lakeville Animal Control

Every day, police officers respond to reports of all sorts of events and nonevents, most of which never make the news. Here is a sampling of lesser-known — but no less noteworthy — incidents from police log books (a.k.a. blotters) in our communities.

EMU APPREHENDED

An emu that was on the loose in Lakeville was recently taken into custody. The Globe previously reported that the feathered fugitive had been spotted in multiple locations in the area of Lang Street and County Road, and Animal Control Officer David Frates appealed to the public for help in locating the bird, which was apparently abandoned by its owner. “I have a man who is experienced at catching emus willing to help, but we need to find where it hangs out the most,” Frates wrote in a Facebook post on Sept. 4. But the emu’s time on the lam was running out. On Sept. 9, Frates announced that the “elusive Emu was safely captured” and shared a photo of it in custody on Facebook. Frates also thanked Lakeville police dispatchers for handling all of the emu-related calls that came in, and the patrol officers for helping them in the search for the big bird, which ended up being located on private property. “I would like to thank the owners of the property for graciously letting us invade their space,” Frates wrote. “The emu will now be living in an awesome home.”

STRANGE SQUIRREL RESCUE

Hilary Cohen, the animal control officer for the town of Norfolk, recently helped some baby squirrels get out of a sticky situation. On Sept. 6, she received a report of some squirrels caught up in fishing line, but that turned out not to be the case at all. They were actually suffering from a case of “sap tail,” an uncomfortable condition that occurs when squirrels get sap in their tails. Cohen called animal control officers from Millis and Medway to provide a helping hand. The young squirrels “ended up getting all stuck together and it was a monumental feat to figure out how the heck we were going to get them untangled,” Cohen wrote on Facebook. “So not only stick(y)/stuck together, they had literally knotted their tails and bodies together, and on scene they were stuck to the forest floor tangled in roots. This was my first time playing ‘squirrel puzzle.’” They bundled up the babies and brought them to Main Street Veterinary Hospital in Millis. The vet team there examined the squirrels, and “after a lot of mineral oil, gas sedation, and then rehydration,” they were able to be released back into the wild. Cohen thanked Animal Control Officers Erin Mallette and Kelley Ward for their help and posted videos of the baby squirrels being released on Facebook, and said she would be checking on them later to make sure they made it up to the correct nest to their waiting mother.

PEDAL TO THE METAL

At approximately 11:26 a.m. June 18, Franklin police officers responded to a report that a car had been driven into a wall of an apartment complex on Gatehouse Lane. According to police, the driver mistook the gas pedal for the brake in the parking lot. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

WILL THEY NEVER LEARN?

We previously wrote about that tractor-trailer that got its roof torn off while traveling under a commuter rail bridge in Canton on Aug. 11, and on Sept. 8, Soldiers Field Road in Brighton was closed when a truck’s top slammed into a bridge. Between those two, we learned of another “Storrowing” incident that happened over Labor Day weekend. On Sept. 2, Andover police shared a photo on Facebook of a moving truck that was wedged underneath a bridge on Central Street. Police later reported that the truck had been removed and the road was reopened to traffic after inspectors “confirmed the structural integrity of the bridge.”