Behind the scenes of Toronto’s $15,000 capybara caper

The 36-day spring hunt for the wayward High Park Zoo rodents cost the city more than $15,000 for a tracker’s services and staff overtime.

TheStar.com
Aug. 24, 2016
By Robin Levinson King

This is the true story of Bonnie and Clyde.

No, not the infamous outlaws who went on an armed robbery spree during the Great Depression. This is about the two endearing but evasive capybaras who escaped from the High Park Zoo, prompting a media frenzy and month-long search and rescue mission.

Lost in the park’s 400 acres of forest, ponds and trails, the mischievous rodents evaded capture for 36 days and cost the city at least $15,000 in services and overtime for about 30 employees, according to emails from the city’s parks and recreation division obtained through access to information laws.

It all began the morning of May 24, when the capybaras, which had been purchased for a total of $700 from a Texas breeder, were dropped off at their pen in High Park Zoo.

Zookeepers had hoped to exchange the duo, who are capable of breeding, for lonely old Chewy, High Park’s OG capybara. But Bonnie and Clyde, as they were later nicknamed by city staff, had freedom in mind and went on the lam.

As soon as news of their harrowing escape broke, phone calls poured in from people all over Toronto claiming to have spotted the little scoundrels.

“She was walking her cat and the capybara ran up the trunk of a tree on her boulevard. She also mentioned it had grey fur,” said one such email.

Another person reported seeing an odd hairless animal with a long tail near the intersection of Shaughnessy Blvd. and Van Horne Ave.

“Looked like a giant rat but it wasn’t a rat and it wasn’t scared,” another email read.

There were dozens of calls but few legitimate sightings - the city was so caught up in capybara fever that everything from a family of beavers near the Don Valley Parkway to a groundhog at Fort York was mistaken for the enormous South American rodents, which look remarkably like giant guinea pigs.

On May 28, parks staff got their first lucky break: police responded to a call from a person whose house backs onto Grenadier Pond in High Park, who had seen what appeared to be a capybara scuttle through a backyard.

When police arrived, the critter was gone but its tracks remained.

“This is a very credible sighting,” wrote Donna Kovachis, parks manager for the Etobicoke York District, in an email obtained by the Star.

Another lucky sighting, at Lower Duck Pond, helped establish a “working theory” that the capybaras hadn’t gone very far - they were hanging out in High Park all along, like a couple of summer picnickers.

But how to catch those rascally rodents?

Kovachis was wary of sending staff out to try to trap the animals, as it was outside of the division’s “expertise,” she noted in her email on May 28. Instead, the department enlisted the help of Animal Services to set out traps and nets, and staff left treats of corn, carrots and watermelon to try to lure the capys back to the same spot.

By June 14 - about midway through the capybara search - the city had paid about $10,300 in overtime to 28 staff, according to an overtime table sent to general supervisor for the Etobicoke York District, Helen Sousa, and obtained through access to information laws.

Kovachis also hired an animal tracker to help catch the capys, and asked for referrals from Animal Services and the Toronto Zoo. But in the end, only one tracker was up for the job - and he wouldn’t come cheap.

According to documents, the city spent $5,500 on professional services related to the capybara hunt. The tracker, whose name was withheld from the documents obtained by the Star because of his request for confidentiality, began work June 9 and ended work on June 24.

Meanwhile, the city received help from some volunteer trackers - including one Ben Lovatt, an animal lover who makes a living dealing in rare animal skulls and running educational programs about prehistoric biology.

Lovatt and his friends had an early close call with the capy camping out at Lower Duck Pond, and nearly captured it himself.

“Could not capture w/o a person in a boat to lure it back to land but my friend got within a metre of it on spring road before someone jogged by and spooked it,” his friend wrote on June 6.

It wasn’t until June 12 that the city caught its big break - with the help of employees from the Toronto Wildlife Centre, a registered charity. TWC workers had been on the scene laying traps in the capys’ favourite haunts for just two days when one of the critters wandered into a cage near Lower Duck Pond around 7 p.m.

“We got it!” exclaimed Kovachis in an email about an hour later.

“That’s fantastic!” wrote her colleague, Karen Fulcher.

“One down ... one more to go!” Jorge Ture wrote the next morning, after hearing the good news.

Reports of the capture spread quickly, and by the next day the parks team was busy arranging photo-ops, a checkup with the vet and even a meet-and-greet with the mayor.

Throughout the whole capybara saga, city staff had been keenly aware of the media circus circling around the capybaras, fed in part by the trending social media hashtag #capybarawatch.

For journalists hungry for a summer story, the escaped capybaras were like a gift from heaven, and staff were regularly bombarded with media requests. From the get-go, emails reveal that staff were concerned about appearing incompetent in front of the media, and this concern influenced not only their communications strategy but the search itself.

Kovachis advised staff not to put out traps themselves on May 28 but rather to wait for Animal Services because it was not their “expertise.”

“There is media on site so we do not want to showcase our inability,” she wrote.

Exactly why it took the city a full 36 days to capture both capys isn’t clear, at least not from the emails obtained by the Star.

It took an extra two weeks to trap the second one and end the capybara watch for good. But like an overlooked second child, the second capybara got little attention in staff emails.

The hunt for the remaining capybara finally ended June 28, when city staff were able to trap it near Grenadier Pond, media reports announced. Parks staff didn’t send an email about the capture until a day later, when staff informed Kovachis that capy #2 had a clean bill of health.

In the end, the tracker the city hired for $5,500 didn’t catch a single capybara.

About a week after the first capybara was caught, the hired tracker sent the city a status report - he had set up five traps, and was bringing in some extra-large ones to accommodate Capy #2, who was much pudgier than the first.

"Now that we know we're (sic) it's frequenting lately and it's checking for food we will hone in on it,” the tracker assured.

But the city, ready to cut him loose, terminated his services on June 24, a few days before the second capybara was caught.

“Our staff had no expertise in animal capture - they have been recruited and hired for their ability in animal care. The trapper helped us to understand the methods and concepts around trapping the animals, however the cost of continuing these services was prohibitive and our staff felt they had developed the necessary skills to take this work on themselves,” parks spokesperson Matthew Cutler told the Star in an email.

One factor that didn’t help the search, according to parks staff, was the media frenzy. Staff sent numerous emails advising that areas be shut down to the media, or complaining about how the capybaras got spooked by an overzealous lookie-loo.

If they could do it over again, Cutler says, they would have closed off sections of the park to the public much sooner.

“While our original plan was to minimize public impact from the search, if we were faced with this situation again, we would definitely be quicker to close the park to enable quicker capture,” Cutler said.