Officials patrolling Strelley, Nottinghamshire, saw the little bird “marching” in the middle of the road, according to a police statement sent to CNN on Monday.
Police “moved quickly to ask him about what he was doing walking in the middle of a road,” according to the release, before returning the Humboldt penguin to his home on a farm about a mile away.
“We were very surprised when we encountered a penguin on our shift,” said Nottinghamshire Police Chief Gareth Philp.
“We see some very interesting things when we’re on patrol, but a penguin running in the middle of the road must be one of the more bizarre findings we encountered.”
Philp said he and his colleagues nicknamed the penguin Po-Po.
“He posed for some photos with us and he was very friendly with our officers while we made contact with his owner,” Philp said.
Nottinghamshire Police Inspector Gordon Fenwick said: “Our officers are trained to deal with a variety of incidents with complex requirements and it is great that we are reuniting the penguin with its owner soon.”
Humboldt penguins are native to South America and live on the Pacific coasts of Chile and Peru, according to the Smithsonian Institution.
In 2016, a family in the northern Peruvian city of Chimbote feared they had been broken into after hearing a disturbance in their kitchen, and jumped out of bed to search for a medium-sized Humboldt penguin for food.
Local authorities eventually removed the penguin and escorted him in a police car to a lagoon at a zoo.
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