Into the woods with the pet detectives

What is Pennsylvania's largest wild animal? 

(We'll have a real stumper in this space each week. You'll find the answer at the bottom, but don't miss all the good stuff in between.)

» One thing to know: A bill has been introduced that would legalize Philly's many illicit backyard chickens, Philly Mag reports. We covered the broader backyard chicken movement in this newsletter last week.

» One thing to share: Redditor u/pghhuman is saying goodbye to the city of Pittsburgh, but not without first bidding farewell to its "feathered nightmares" — the ones with their own dedicated police force. 

» One thing to wear: "You've got an enemy in Pennsylvania," declares the must-have shirt of the summer, modeled here by Spotlight PA's own Stephen Caruso. (They're currently sold out.)

» One test to take: The Inquirer's "Prospective PA Politicians Pop Quiz," where you can test your own Pennsylvanian-ness™️ before maybe running for office yourself some day. Good luck! 

» One thing to see: Wilkes-Barre's stunning The Lady of the Valley mural by Evan Lovett. While we're on the subject: TikTok-er PA Junkie tries to settle an age-old debate about how the town is really pronounced.

Every once in a while my dogs, a normally docile duo, decide it's time to explore their options. It's happened twice — both in the wilds of north central Pennsylvania — and on both occasions they wandered off and I did what seemed perfectly logical at the time: I hollered and I chased.

"That's one of the worst things you can do," Tracey Morgan-Chopick, a Luzerne County-based professional pet detective, explained by phone. "They don't go towards stress. It's the people that make dogs run farther."

I haven't needed a pet sleuth, at least not yet. (The kids have always returned on their own, usually looking rather proud of themselves.) But lots of people do, and demand for services like Tracey's is surging on the heels of a pandemic pet-buying boom. 

Tracey, pictured at right, has been at it for at least a decade. She's tracked down dogs (one after four years), cats, pigs, and a turtle — the latter proving surprisingly agile. 

She said dogs will cover more ground than cats, sometimes using railroad tracks or power-line clearings like secret highways. They also tend to stick closer to water sources. (In her experience, Boxers are especially danger-prone and Shelties especially resourceful.)

Cats are normally found much closer to home; they’re just incredibly good at hiding. 

They're so good at it, in fact, that Ted Bachman, a detective with Lehigh Valley Pet Search, uses heat-sensing thermal imaging cameras (both handheld and drone-mounted) to suss them out. 

Bachman recalls watching through a thermal camera as the heat signal from a cat hunkered down in a treeline evaporated just as a human with a net moved in. They were all completely mystified until they found a burrow in the ground. With a strategically positioned trap, a little food, and a lot of patience, a family reunion soon followed. 

Neither Tracey nor Ted take any payment for their services. Both have day jobs and, it's safe to say, a soft spot for animals. Some of their cases start out as overextended excursions, the kind I'm familiar with, while others begin more seriously with house fires or car accidents. 

You might remember the case of Gingerbread, a 2 1/2-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback/hound mix who went missing after a car crash on the South Bridge in Harrisburg in April. 

Dog dad Quentin Bade and his partner were connected with a pet detective in Virginia soon after. The expert provided guidance via phone on how to make the most effective missing posters, where to put them, and what not to do when they finally found Gingerbread.

"She said: 'Don't approach her fast. In fact, don't approach her at all. When you see her and she sees you, run the other way and pretend to fall and just lie there,'" Quentin recalled. In the end it worked "perfectly" and Gingerbread was back after several anxious days for the family. 

Gingerbread was roughly two miles as the crow flies from the crash scene, having zigzagged extensively within that radius in the course of her weekend-long journey. Some sojourns last much longer. 

Melissa Kessler of Where’s Fido? in Clinton County once tracked a German shepherd lost in the mountains for 31 days — to say nothing of the domesticated fox she once helped locate.

Tracey Morgan-Chopick recalls one dog that traveled more than 30 miles from home. "Get them spayed or neutered," she added, "those hormones are a powerful thing. Sometimes they’re getting the scent of another dog and …" The line went slack. 

"Excuse me, you can probably hear mine barking upstairs right now."

—Colin Deppen, Spotlight PA 

I have been in Pennsylvania,

In the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys.


In the blue Susquehanna

On a Saturday morning

I saw a mounted constabulary go by,

I saw boys playing marbles.

Spring and the hills laughed.

—An excerpt from Carl Sandburg's poem "Pennsylvania"