Great Dames Trap & Recover had the wallaby encaged around 11 p.m. Saturday.

A team effort has led to the capture of the runaway wallaby from the town of Mina.

In a Facebook post by Small Town Shelter Inc. in Sherman, it was announced the wallaby was “now safe at home, in his pen, with a newly fixed gate, and his family!”

Credit for the capture was given to Beth Thompson and Vicki Cusimano of Great Dames Trap & Recover. “We confirmed the area where the wallaby was frequenting yesterday, and Beth and Vicki had him in a trap by tonight at 10:40 p.m.!” the post noted.

“We are ever so thankful, and still shocked and amazed that they did it so quickly. These two don’t mess around!

“It has been a crazy, chaotic couple of days, but we sure are glad it was a positive outcome.

“It is pretty unlikely that a situation such as this will ever present itself to small town shelter again, but if it does, we will be ready!”

The formerly loose wallaby near Mina was garnering plenty of attention on social media. Charlie Sorce, the wallaby’s owner for the last month, said the marsupial is about a year old, brown in color and a foot and a half tall.

“It got out underneath a gate,” Sorce told The Post-Journal on Wednesday. “It shouldn’t have, but it did. Now it’s gone up the road and is stretching its legs. They are nocturnal, so they sleep during the day and are out at night.”

Sorce was working with Kelly Thornton, owner of Small Town Shelter in Sherman, to corral the marsupial

Thompson said that Great Dames Trap & Recover got involved because she saw the situation on Facebook.

“I was scrolling on Facebook and I follow Small Town Shelter, so I saw the post about the wallaby with (Sorce’s) phone number,” Thompson said. “I reached out and offered our services and explained the different types of traps we use.”

Thompson said Sorce was excited to hear about them and told them that he did not know anyone in the area provided trapping services like this.

The wallaby was trapped a little more than a mile from Sorce’s house after it took shelter in a vacant barn. Thompson said trapping it included setting out a food plot so that the wallaby would be more likely to stay in the same place while they got the traps in place.

“He went into the barn a little more than a mile away, and I guess he decided that was his new home,” Cusimano said. “It was actually easy to trap. We didn’t know if it would work because wallabies tend to only eat grass, but we put some lettuce in the trap and he went right in.”

Cusimano is also the Dog Control Officer for the towns of Busti and Lakewood. Thompson added the pair had done their research before trapping it Saturday night, as the two had never done something like this before.

“We’ve been trapping dogs for the past six years but a wallaby was something new,” Thompson said. “We had no idea what we were getting into. It was all going to depend on what happened because if it got spooked we needed to know what to do next.”

Thompson and Cusimano said Sorce was great to work with and they enjoyed being able to work with him and bring the wallaby home. It went smoother than the pair thought it would, but they added that they never divulge where they are working on trapping an animal as people often come and try to help and risk scaring it off. Often it can be “a big game of chess where the animal is in charge”.

“We got lucky with this one,” Cusimano said.