SerpApi.Org
A famous Perry County emu has died.
As first reported by abc27, owner Hanna Yohn posted to Facebook that Elvis died on Friday.
“With great sadness I find myself making this post,” she said. “My sweet loving silly boy Elvis has passed. He had a good 5 years with me and was well loved and well cared for. This morning when I came up to care for him I had found that he had sadly passed away. Previous to this he had been his happy self trotting around and eating his favorite treats.”
Yohn speculated in the Facebook post that the poor air quality due to the wildfire smoke this past week may have contributed to his death. Elvis had no known underlying health issues.
In 2021 Yohn, then 15, spotted the emu near her grandmother’s home in Newport as she stepped off the school bus.
Elvis had spent seven months running around Perry County. The bird was originally from Loysville, but residents reported seeing it all the way down to Shermans Dale, up to Little Buffalo State Park, and back near a Karns in New Bloomfield.
Drawing on her experience raising other birds, she decided to try to capture Elvis. Yohn approached him calmly with some treats.
“Once he saw the food, he just came right over,” Yohn said at the time. “He wasn’t scared at all.”
After the original owners did not want to take the bird back, Yohn was able to keep Elvis.
Yohn said in the message on Friday that she didn’t know how old he was since he came from a different home.
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