Missing Red Panda: Search for Sunny Enters the Weekend

NORFOLK, VA — Where's Sunny? She's been missing from the Virginia Zoo in Hampton Roads since Tuesday, and residents throughout the area have been scouring nearby property in the ensuing days with no success.

Who is Sunny? She's a 19-month-old red panda who somehow wandered away from her fenced-in habitat sometime between early Monday night and Tuesday morning.

Her handlers had hoped she may have simply fallen from a slippery branch Monday night to flee a male would-be paramour, giving that it's panda breeding season, but an exhaustive search of the enclosure and zoo grounds has turned up no sign of Sunny.

The zoo said it has received numerous calls about possible Sunny sightings but all they all turned up were raccoon sightings.

"Hopefully it’s in an area that it can feed on bamboo," Greg Bockheim, the zoo's executive director, told the Virginian-Pilot. "It might even approach people if it's hungry and they look approachable."

But if that were to happen, zoo officials warn not to touch, feed or try to capture Sunny. Instead, try to keep your eyes on the animal while calling the zoo hotline at 757-777-7899.

Sunny's plight might remind some D.C.-area folks of Rusty the red panda, who escaped from the Smithsonian National Zoo in the summer of 2013 and was found several hours later in a residential area of Adams Morgan.

Photo: Virginia Zoo