Cathy Shaw with her old friend

An exotic stick insect was miraculously reunited with its owner after escaping from a high-rise building, climbing nine floors and crawling into a children’s centre in Camden Town. B

ug enthusiast Cathy Shaw had not noticed that her jungle nymph had disappeared from the window of her Camden Town apartment. And any passerby could have mistaken her for a leaf. B

But this week she was reunited with her old friend after a family found him sitting – to use stick insect terms – far, far from home on a wall near the Agar Children’s Centre on Wrotham Road.

Ms Shaw said: “He was quite old and his wings were broken so he couldn’t fly. I’m not sure how he got out of there. He was the last of my jungle nymphs as I’m trying to limit the numbers so I thought it would be OK to have him in a pot full of blackberries next to my TV. I just thought ‘stay there and live the rest of your life, old man’, something like that.”

The insect was discovered by Ellie Daligan, who spotted the large brown animal on a fence near the centre last Thursday. The next day she saw that it had moved further down onto a concrete wall.

Pets come in all shapes and sizes

She said: “I felt sorry for him. We love animals in this house. So I came with my three-year-old daughter and my husband. She loves beetles and was very excited. We put him in a hamster wheel – I didn’t know what to do with it, but I didn’t want to leave him to die.” Over the weekend they kept the beetle in a tank and fed it birch leaves.

“I tried calling the zoo as I could think of only one other place,” Ms Daligan said. “They said they wouldn’t take anything from the public and suggested the RSPCA. I didn’t know if that was the right place. It didn’t do anything for a while and when it was given something to eat it perked up.”

Mrs Daligan’s daughter looks at the stick insect in an aquarium while her mother looks for its owner

Everyone has seen a social media post about lost cats, but the family’s search for the jungle nymph’s owner may have been a little special to anyone scrolling through – but there was still no indication of where the cat came from.

She only found Ms. Shaw by chance after speaking to the concierge of the neighboring apartments about her discovery – who knew exactly who might be missing a stick insect in one of the apartments upstairs.

“He’s back home now, which is really good. We were happy that he didn’t just die,” Ms Daligan said.

“When she (Mrs Shaw) came to pick it up, she just picked it up and left it on her top for a while before putting it in the paper bag.”

The reunion was a bit of a surprise for Mrs. Shaw, because only the concierge knew that she was collecting insects and she had not noticed that the animal had left its pot.

“It’s a long way. He can’t fly, so I don’t know how he got down there,” she said.

Mrs. Shaw thought her nymph was in a pot next to the television

“There are lots of wild rats and crows and other things and nobody has done anything to him, which is really nice. To be honest, they’re not the best stick insects because if they feel threatened they’ll grab you with their hind legs and they have spines on their hind legs which can hurt. The males aren’t as bad as the females though.”

Ms Shaw collects and breeds exotic insects as a hobby, which she started during the coronavirus lockdown.

She estimates that her insect collection – from orchid mantises to salmon-pink tarantulas – currently numbers “several hundred” since her jumping spiders have just had their young.

“Everyone is into jumping spiders right now. Their little faces are so cute,” she said, adding that she is more afraid of house spiders.

Ms Shaw said: “There is a big hobby of collecting insects. I really like praying mantises. That’s what I started with.”

Another specimen from Mrs Shaw’s insect collection in her house in Camden Town, which includes several hundred specimens

She orders young beetles from websites and has them delivered by mail, and she also attends insect exhibitions across the country.

“I’m trying to reduce that and focus more on taxidermy,” she said. “People send me their dead insects and I taxidermy them and frame them.”

She added that she was very grateful to Ms Daligan’s family for rescuing her jungle nymph and sent them a card to thank them.