The Daily Parker

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The Flamingo Incident

The Atlantic's Ross Andersen recaps a mass murder at the Rock Creek Park Zoo in Washington, D.C.:

Tales of fox cunning are as old as culture. Aesop’s foxes were constantly involved in deceptions. In Apache lore, a thieving fox stands in for Prometheus, stealing fire for humans. I imagine that at the zoo, the fox walked back and forth along the flamingo fence, sussing out its vulnerabilities. Tunneling underneath wasn’t practical: A concrete dig barrier extends underground, too deep for a single night’s digging. If the fox tried to chip away at it over several nights, zookeepers would have noticed. Whether out of insight or frustration, at some point in the dark hours before dawn, the fox began to grind the fence mesh between his teeth. Like a spy cutting a circle of glass out of a high-rise windowpane, he was able to chew a softball-size hole in the fence and, with some wriggling, slip through.

Sara Hallager arrived at the Bird House just after 6 o’clock that morning. As the zoo’s head curator for birds, Hallager makes sure to check on the animals first thing when she works the early shift, methodically looking in on the cranes and herons. When she reached the flamingo enclosure, she was alarmed to find herself eye to eye with the fox. Not all foxes react skittishly upon spotting a human, but this one seemed to have consciousness of guilt. “As soon as he saw me, he ran away through the hole in the fence that he had created,” Hallager told me. Any hopes that the fox had just arrived were dashed when she saw that pink-feathered mayhem was strewn across the enclosure’s bare soil and in its shallow pool. “I could already see a large number of dead flamingos,” Hallager said.

Sad to say, it did not end well for the flamingos or for "a fox, but not necessarily the fox." Personally, I'd have rooted for Team Vulpes.

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