Every day stray cats are brought to shelters in New York. Few become famous, and even fewer, it is safe to say, are tourists. So it was a big event yesterday when a healthy seven-pound calico, found on East Twentieth Street, was discovered, through an embedded microchip, to belong to the Squires family of Boulder, Colorado. Willow, as the cat was named back in Boulder (even if it sounds like the kind of name a recent transplant would invent for herself in Manhattan), had run away five years ago and hadn't been heard from since.
Among the many mysteries: how will the city have changed her? It’s a great web meme: the runaway who makes good in New York only to be forced to return to her family in some western state, where she’ll be bound to complain that nothing stays open late enough. (It helps the story that in photographs, Willow does not appear pleased.) The Squires family, meanwhile, is thrilled: “The kids can’t wait to see her,” James Squires told the Associated Press. “And we still have her little Christmas stocking.” (Meh, mutters the newly callous Willow.) If not for the embedded microchip, Willow would have been gone for good. (Squires said that the family has chips in all of its pets, and would put them in their children, as well, if such a thing were possible.)
That was nearly the case for the owners of Coby, a black border collie that went missing in Atlanta as the collateral damage, along with a viola da gamba, of a car theft. As Susan Orlean wrote in a piece for the magazine in 2005, Coby did not have a chip, and he wasn’t even wearing his collar. However, he did have an owner who worked for the Centers for Disease Control, and, with her colleagues, she used "Contagion"-like epidemiological tactics to track him. (“After Wednesday night’s fruitless search, Bell decided it was time to accelerate into an outbreak investigation.”)
That story had a happy ending, thanks to an improbable series of good breaks. Yet it’s a reminder that not all chance encounters between humans and animals are benign, and that their routes can be mysterious. (Again, see "Contagion.")
The Willow mystery has been fun, but it may be over. This morning Gothamist shared a tip from a cat-sitter who said that Willow, known in these parts as Molly, was found five years ago in Colorado by a ski-tripping New Yorker, taken to a vet, and then brought to the city on an airplane. Willow/Molly is said to have spent the intervening years in Brooklyn. (No word on how she made her latest escape, across the East River.)
Other, wilder members of the animal kingdom cover significant distances on their own. Here are a few noteworthy sojourns:
40,000 miles: Willow has nothing on the sooty shearwater, an oceangoing bird with a forty-three inch wingspan, which covers a record distance of forty thousand miles, from New Zealand to Alaska, every year. (The arctic tern, which flies from pole to pole each year, may cover a greater distance, but it has yet to be recorded, according to National Geographic.)
12,400 miles: In 2005, a female great white shark whom scientists named Nicole, covered the distance in nine months, in the first charted migration by a shark. Robert Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory told National Geographic that the researched proved sharks were more than just “ocean nomads that roam about” at whim.
6,200 miles: In 2010, a female humpback whale (with the less feminine name AHWC No. 1363) swam from Brazil to Madagascar, marking the longest migration by a mammal ever recorded. A marine scientist explained to the A.P., “It may be that this is an extreme example of exploration. Or it could be that the animal got very lost.”
1,500 miles: Each year, hoardes of wildebeest, along with some fellow-travelling zebras mixed in, complete a circular migration in East Africa in what has been identified as the world’s biggest overland migration.
900 miles: The astonishing roundtrip flight of dragonflies between India and the Maldives, announced in the Journal of Tropical Ecology in 2009, may be the longest insect migration on earth.
Unlike the bugs and beasts, Willow will always have New York. In lonely moments, trapped back in provincial Boulder prix christian louboutin, she can cue up an old standard and meow along with mournful Ol’ Blue Eyes or Billie Holiday. Willow, we’ll weep for you.
Photograph by Bebeto Matthews/AP.
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