Hippopotamuses mate in water, are born in water and spend most of the day wallowing in muddy pools — but there comes a time in every hippo’s life when she simply wants to have dry feet.  For Nikica, aged 11, that moment came this week after floodwaters surged through the zoo in Montenegro where she spends her days. Seizing the moment, she bobbed to the top of the cage and swam to freedom.

Now Nikica, weighing in at two tonnes, is a hippo on the run; an uneasy, lurking presence in the village of Plavnica. For the time being, there is no going back: the private zoo, on a small island on Lake Skadar, is completely submerged.

So, trailed discreetly by two armed security men from the zoo, Nikica is roaming freely, sizing up the locals. Children in the village have been told to stay indoors; sound advice, not only because hippos tend to be grumpy, but also because they spin their tails like rotor blades when excreting. The idea is to mark out the maximum expanse of territory — plainly, it does not do to stand too close.

Nikica does not represent a threat to anyone,” said Dragan Pejovic, the owner of the zoo, “unless someone attacks and kicks her.”

Villagers have been laying out hay for her to eat. “When I left my house to feed my cow, I saw a hippo standing in front of the stall,” said a farmer, Nikola Radovic. “I thought I was losing my mind.” To stop further scrumping missions, waiters from Mr Pejovic’s family restaurant have been piling up stale loaves to help to sate Nikica’s hunger pangs.

The plan now is to wait for the flood waters to recede and hope that Nikica does not, in the interim, grow to like countryside life better than the confines of her pen. There is also the fear that, in time, she could harm a villager. Colombia, for example, has had a herd or “bloat” of hippos roving the land since the late drug baron Pablo Escobar was forced out of his estate near Medellín towards the end of the turbulent 1980s.

The four hippos from his private menagerie became 16 but three had to be killed by hunters recently after they started to attack people and kill cattle in the area.

Authorities in Montenegro, however, have promised not to fire a shot unless Nikica directly attacks somebody. “When the water warms up and does not seem so threatening, she will return of her own free will,” said a zookeeper. “She loves mud more than life itself.”

Great escapes

Goldie the golden eagle escaped from London Zoo in 1965 and became a national obsession as he flew from tree to tree in Regent’s Park for 11 days. He was finally captured — only to escape again four days later

• The Tamworth Two, a pair of pigs, escaped at the abattoir gates in Malmesbury in 1998, attracting international attention. They were caught after a week — and sent to an animal sanctuary

• A zoo in Adelaide was evacuated last year when Karta, an orang-utan, used a stick to short-circuit the electric fence around her enclosure

• In 2008 a giraffe led a breakout from a circus in the Netherlands after kicking open a fence. Fifteen camels, several llamas and a pig also escaped, but all were rounded up after a brief altercation with a neighbourhood dog.