Past animal sightings part fact, part comedy
Milwaukee lion elusive, but state’s kangaroo sightings have been both real and a prank
While the Milwaukee lion remains elusive, other wildlife from the area’s past keep jumping back into view. And not just lions. We’ve had kangaroos, too. In April 1978, Waukesha County authorities started getting reports of a kangaroo hopping around. A family in the Town of Pewaukee spotted it in their backyard. A Muskego couple driving late at night caught it in their headlights in the early morning hours. A Town of Brookfield man saw it in his yard while eating breakfast on a Sunday morning.
Despite what felt like a marsupial invasion — at least in the newspapers — authorities didn’t take it too seriously.
“We respond and talk to the people, but there is no, quote, investigation,” Waukesha County sheriff’s Lt. Gary Paluszcyk told The Milwaukee Journal in April 1978. Paluszcyk noted that the sightings “coincide with the prime feeding or movement times of whitetail deer,” but he was diplomatic about the implications.
“I think it would be a very good possibility, but I wouldn’t second-guess anyone who saw one,” he said.
Finally, a hunting party — emphasis on the party — was organized at a Pewaukee pub. And they found: nothing.
Twenty-two years later, the truth came out.
Randy Latta told Journal Sentinel columnist Laurel Walker in 2000 that he and his older brother, Rick, and two friends — inspired by reports of kangaroo sightings in Illinois — took a homemade plywood cutout of a kangaroo and attached handles to the back of it. Then they hid in the bushes near their neighborhood in Brookfield and, when a car came by, one of them hopped with the cutout across the road.
“We’d just watch reactions,” Randy Latta said in the 2000 interview. “Some pulled over, some got out their flashlights and walked around. We’d just bust out laughin’.”
In January 2005, there were more kangaroo sightings — this time just outside of Dodgeville. But instead of being a phantom or a plywood cutout, it was . . . a kangaroo. More than a dozen in Iowa County tracked the animal to a barn, coaxed it into a crate and took it to Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo.
It lived at the Madison zoo until it died in 2008. While the animal was no mystery, its origin was: According to the Dodgeville Chronicle, no one ever stepped forward to claim ownership of the ’roo in question.