Wanda Harris was on her way to work about 8:30 Friday morning on Tucson's south side, and wondered why traffic was stopped even though there wasn't a red light.
Then she saw.
"There was an emu out there. It was blocking traffic" on the corner of South Nogales Highway and Aerospace Parkway, near Flight Safety International, where Harris works, and near Raytheon.
When the emu started looking into a car window, as if to say, "'Who are you? Can you help me?'," Harris decided to snap some photos. When she got up next to the big bird herself, she "talked" to it but it just looked up at the sky, down at the ground, all around, "so I said, OK, I'm going around you."
A surprising sight in Tucson traffic early Friday: an emu peeking into the window of a car, at the corner of South Nogales Highway at Aerospace Parkway.
Once she got to work, Harris announced, "Hey, there's an emu out there, directing traffic."
"It was cute to see it," she says, chuckling. "It's got to be a big pet. I'm hoping it got picked up, safe."
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A work colleague posted Harris' pics in the Facebook group "Weird stuff you'll only see in/near Tucson," and they soon heard it is indeed a pet and that someone is looking for it.
That someone is a guy who says his name is Tattoo Tattoo ("I had it legally changed to that in 1996," he says), who owns a ranch with exotic animals on South Nogales Highway.
"His name is Liberty," as in the TV emu that pitches Liberty Mutual insurance, Tattoo says, singing the "Liberty, Liberty" jingle. His daughter picked the name to be funny, after Tattoo acquired the flightless bird — then in egg form — four years ago in trade from "a gentleman I did a tattoo on."
Liberty the emu with its owner, Tattoo Tattoo, in happier times.
Liberty gained his, uh, freedom sometime overnight Thursday. Tattoo, getting up about 4 a.m. Friday for his morning run, saw the cage door was bent. "He must have slipped through."
Tattoo said he was on his second tank of gas by Friday afternoon after driving all around the region looking for his emu.
When he learned photos had been posted on social media of Liberty near Raytheon, "I hauled butt up there," but the bird had already moved on. Then he heard an "ostrich" had been spotted in the yard at a neighborhood school, Elvira, but it was gone by the time he arrived.
Watch an emu race through the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, Illinois.
"There's an APB out" on social media for Liberty, its owner says: Emu, 4 years old, 7 feet tall, goes about 30 mph, "looks like a raptor."
"I'm extremely worried," Tattoo said Friday afternoon. "I don't want him to get hit."
Just moseying down the highway, as an emu will, on a crisp Tucson morning.
