A hunt for a lioness on the outskirts of Berlin provoked the deployment of helicopters, drones, and officers with night vision goggles. Last week, this hunt came to a surprising end after the authorities announced that it was likely a case of inaccurate identity.
After experts were called in to analyze grainy footage that stimulated the two-day search, they independently came to the same judgment: “We think that this picture probably shows a wild boar,” Michael Grubert, the mayor of Kleinmachnow, said at a news conference on Friday afternoon.
It was an anti-climactic end to a search that fascinated Germany and upended a constellation of communities on the southern edge of the city, later officials sent more than 100 police officers equipped with riot gear, thermal energy imaging cameras, and at most one armored vehicle blowing away through a trio of heavily wooded towns.
The lioness case began when two men captured a blurry video of what they believed was a lion chasing a wild boar and reported it to the police around midnight on a Thursday. The search began quickly and escalated rapidly. To figure out where the animal came from, the police called the owners of a local circus.
The decision to call off the search was made after a resident called the police on Friday reporting that they had seen the lion. The police flew a drone over the area and sent in a team of officers equipped with heat imaging cameras. They found nothing except a pack of wild boars. They announced that it had been a false alarm, Ms. Bastians said, came as an immense surprise.
Dr. Hofer confirmed this. He has worked in the Serengeti since 1987 and lived there for over a decade. Dr. Hofer a local official reached out to him on Friday morning and asked him to analyze the blurry video of the apparent lioness. Some of the animal’s characteristics in the video were constant with the attributes of a wildcat. But there were also other factors like the length of the animal’s tail and a glance of a young boar running through the frame of the video that called the identification into question.
“I can see some of the reasons for the confusion,” he said.
After experts were called in to analyze grainy footage that stimulated the two-day search, they independently came to the same judgment: “We think that this picture probably shows a wild boar,” Michael Grubert, the mayor of Kleinmachnow, said at a news conference on Friday afternoon.
It was an anti-climactic end to a search that fascinated Germany and upended a constellation of communities on the southern edge of the city, later officials sent more than 100 police officers equipped with riot gear, thermal energy imaging cameras, and at most one armored vehicle blowing away through a trio of heavily wooded towns.
The lioness case began when two men captured a blurry video of what they believed was a lion chasing a wild boar and reported it to the police around midnight on a Thursday. The search began quickly and escalated rapidly. To figure out where the animal came from, the police called the owners of a local circus.
The decision to call off the search was made after a resident called the police on Friday reporting that they had seen the lion. The police flew a drone over the area and sent in a team of officers equipped with heat imaging cameras. They found nothing except a pack of wild boars. They announced that it had been a false alarm, Ms. Bastians said, came as an immense surprise.
Dr. Hofer confirmed this. He has worked in the Serengeti since 1987 and lived there for over a decade. Dr. Hofer a local official reached out to him on Friday morning and asked him to analyze the blurry video of the apparent lioness. Some of the animal’s characteristics in the video were constant with the attributes of a wildcat. But there were also other factors like the length of the animal’s tail and a glance of a young boar running through the frame of the video that called the identification into question.
“I can see some of the reasons for the confusion,” he said.
