Ollie was found this afternoon. (Photo courtesy of the National Zoo)

They say as soon you stop looking for love Olllie, she comes to the trap you’ve carefully laid for her near the bird house.

Hours after saying that they had ended an active search for the missing bobcat, National Zoo employees joyfully announced that Ollie had been found.

“I don’t mean to be pessimistic at all, but we’re looking for a cat who could literally be sitting in a tree right next to us,” Craig Saffoe, the curator of great cats, said at a press conference this morning. His words proved prescient, as Ollie was found on zoo grounds shortly thereafter.

A visitor saw the 25-pound cat crossing a path near the bird house and alerted keepers there. Saffoe and another staffer grabbed the equipment they had on hand and hurried over to the area. “We took the live traps up to the bird house and set them, you know, crossed our fingers, and walked away. And literally within fifteen minutes, the bird house keepers called us back and told us we have a bobcat in the trap,” Saffoe said. “We’re over the moon.”

It appears that the only injury Ollie sustained is a cut on her left, front paw, but veterinarians will do a full examination tomorrow to check if she contracted an illness or was in any other way harmed by the two-day excursion.

Although zookeepers can’t be certain, it appears that Ollie followed woods and a creek near her exhibit up to Massachusetts Avenue NW. The sightings called in by neighbors “probably were her,” Saffoe said, “and she’s been coming back and forth, going along that way.”

He said Ollie’s disappearance naturally left zookeepers wondering if she escaped in a bid for freedom. Her return “kind of answers that question a little bit to me. I think she wanted to go out have a little bit of fun, see what it was like on the outside—then was like I think I’m ready to come inside now, and she came right back into the trap.”

This post has been updated