Fire chief and council workmen manage to tie their wallaby down

STREWTH! A wallaby has been captured in Lyme Regis.

The animal, first spotted in a garden at Blue Waters Drive last week, was finally apprehended this morning by two council workmen with help from local fire chief Virgil Turner.

Street cleaners Tom Ashe and Rob Arthur managed to catch the animal after it bounded up to their sweeper vehicle at around 7am.

Tom said: “We’d heard the story that a wallaby had been seen in Lyme but we weren’t expecting to come face to face with it like this.

“It wasn’t a straight forward job to catch it. Initially, we saw it hopping about on the sea front where I think a few other people had spotted it too. But then it disappeared.

“It reappeared in the Lym Close area and we then had a couple of attempts at catching it but it was only on the third go, with help from Virgil Turner from Dorset Fire and Rescue, that we finally managed to pin him down and put him into a cage.”

The men managed to safely contain the wallaby in a nearby resident’s garden then contacted the RSPCA.

Unharmed, the animal was then transported to Lyme’s Lifeboat Station by Mr Turner before being collected by the owner of a local animal sanctuary.

It is not known where the wallaby came from but a spokesman for the RSPCA said a number were now living wild in the UK.

Pictures of the wallaby before its capture are on West Dorset council’s Youtube page : www.youtube.com/dorsetforyou