At Sam Morace’s family farm in Green Sea, South Carolina, a jailbreak occurred this summer when one of their emus, upon being moved to a different field, squirmed out of her caretakers’ arms and took off over the fence. Her fieldmate soon followed suit. “I guess the other one said, ‘Hell yeah, if she can do it, I can do it,’” Morace says. Three months later, the emus are still missing and have gained names, bestowed by the community: Thelma and Louise.
Morace and her family are no strangers to the six-foot-tall, 130-pound flightless birds, which are native to Australia. They have another, named Big Bird, who is close with the family and accepts food from their hands. “We’ve had Big Bird since he was a baby,” Morace says. “He loves sweets, and he’s spoiled.” The two fugitives, on the other hand, were rescues and never acclimated to humans in the same way.
Thelma and Louise are the latest escaped animals to capture attention in the area; two weeks ago, forty-three rhesus macaques took advantage of a series of unlocked gates in their enclosure at a research facility and fled. And like the monkeys—of which six are still at large— the emus are capable of staying well fed in the wild. They aren’t picky eaters, Morace says, and are probably munching on the grasses of the fields they have been running through. Residents of the towns of Green Sea, Duford, and Nichols have reported sightings on social media. One emu even showed up on a trail camera.
Last week, Morace finally had to address the people. “For everyone that keeps seeing an emu, yes it is mine,” she posted in the Loris, South Carolina, community Facebook group, garnering hundreds of comments. “Thank you for all the concerns and questions. If the emus were that easy to catch they would be home already.”
In fact, a month or so ago, either Thelma or Louise did return to her old stomping grounds at the Morace farm, “but by the time we spotted her, she was gone like Casper,” Morace says. Currently the family is working with the Horry County police, who posted that they were on the case (and not “emu-sed” about it) and planning to use a tranquilizer on the birds to bring them back for good.
In the meantime, though, as someone commented on the Horry County Police Office page, “That’s great, they can play with the monkeys.”
