Arlington County firefighters received an unusual call for help over the weekend. A TikTok-famous bird — Chester the Toucan — was stuck behind a dishwasher. Luckily, the firefighters were able to successfully extract Chester with no injuries.
Maria Stagliano owns Chester and runs the TikTok account chester_the_toucan. She posted on social media that Chester fell into the toilet by accident. As she gave him a bath afterwards, Chester “fled the scene” and disappeared into a hole near the dishwasher and a false baseboard.
“I was afraid of removing the dishwasher myself since there were tubes back there and I didn’t know if I’d cause damage or have a water supply burst, so I needed professional assistance,” Stagliano posted. When her apartment’s emergency maintenance didn’t help, she turned to the firefighters.
“I figured hey, firemen get cats out of trees. Surely they can get a toucan out of a dishwasher crawl space?” she said
“Thanks to the quick and careful work of our firefighters, Chester was safely rescued without any injuries,” the fire department announced on social media.
Chester is an 8-year-old chestnut-eared aracari, a part of the toucan family. Stagliano adopted him in 2021, and her videos of his “happy honks” have gone viral on TikTok. Today, the account has more than 830,000 followers and 21 million likes.
Feature image courtesy Maria Stagliano
