A wanted fugitive who's been on the run for a month in Wright County has finally been captured.

But it's not what you think.

It's actually a story for the birds.

Brittney Dugger was driving between Seymour and Hartville near the intersection of highways F and V where signs warn you to watch out for Amish buggies and you might expect to occasionally see horses or cattle on the loose.

But this time, traipsing down the middle of the road, was an emu, a flightless bird kin to the ostrich and native to Australia.

"My kids in the back seat are saying, 'There's big bird'"! Dugger recalled. " I'm like, no, not quite. We're a little ways from Sesame Street and you don't see things like that around here."

She posted the sighting to Facebook.

"I got comments asking if it tasted like chicken."

And reported it to the Wright Co. Sheriff's Office.

"She's like, 'can you repeat that again'"? Dugger said of the lady who answered the call. " I'm like, an emu is loose. And she laughed."

The sheriff's office admits it didn't have a lot of experience dealing with emus. And they also had one big problem. If they did catch it, they didn't have a back seat in the squad car big enough to hold it.

Emu's can't fly but they can jump fences easily, and with so much farmland around, the escapee was rarely seen and even harder to corral.

"I had a friend yesterday try to catch it and it actually bit him," Dugger said.

For shooting this story, I had resigned myself to the fact that photos of the fugitive would be all we'd have to show you.

But as I returned back to Springfield on Highway F, guess who showed up?

If you look at the accompanying video, you'll see that the emu obviously is quite curious about cars.

And she walked right up to me when I first got my camera out.

Come to find out her name was "Moo", as in emu. And her owner lived about a mile down the road although Moo had been sighted as far as eight-miles away.

The owner refused to go on camera, but said Moo had escaped several times, apparently looking for love, as in male emus, which are not plentiful in Wright County.

And as I was getting shots of Moo, as good fortune would have it, a Good Samaritan farmer named Leon Veenstra drove by with an enclosed trailer. And after I told him what was going on, he became the hero of our story by luring Moo into his trailer and bringing her back to her owner.

"Well, I thought I'd go back to the farm and get a bucket of grain and this time of year, if you shake a bucket, you can probably catch just about anything."

Words to live by from our hero Leon.