Red panda busts out of zoo, left ‘grumbling’ after he’s captured by fire department

A red panda named “Barney” escaped from his enclosure at a zoo in Germany and was none too pleased when he was captured and brought back.

The pesky critter was discovered missing from his home at the Cologne Zoo on Thursday.

Zoo employees soon spotted Barney high up in a tree outside of the enclosure, the zoo said in a social media post.

Barney, zoo officials said, “could not be persuaded to leave on his own accord.”

Photos showed the red panda staring down at onlookers, seemingly basking in the fact that he was beyond their reach.

In need of assistance, the zoo called the local fire department. Using a ladder truck, the first responders were able to bring Barney back down to safety.

A video posted by the zoo shows Barney scrambling away on snowy tree limbs when firefighters reached him in the canopy.

“The zookeepers caught the little panda on the ground and released him back into his enclosure,” the zoo wrote on social media. 

Barney, back in his enclosure, was “grumbling slightly,” the zoo said.

Zoo officials believe he used a piece of bamboo that was bent under the weight of recent snowfall to make his daring escape.

The red panda has been living at the Cologne Zoo since 2015.

Despite their name, red pandas are not closely related to the black and white Great Panda.

They are endangered, with only about 10,000 remaining in the wild in their native region in the Himalayas, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Slightly larger than a domestic cat, they are known for their elite climbing abilities and spend most of their lives in trees. They use their long, bushy tails to keep them warm in the winter months.

Red pandas have a reputation as escape artists.

In 2022, a red panda broke out of its enclosure at an Australian zoo before it was later found in a fig tree. Another one went missing from an Ohio zoo in 2020. A female red panda seeking out a potential mate slipped out of a Virginia zoo in 2017.