Ananova:

A randy badger sparked a police manhunt for a sex attacker when his howls of passion were mistaken for a woman screaming.

Police in Linz, in western Germany, scrambled a helicopter and officers with night vision goggles after members of the public called to alert them about a sex attack in progress.

But as police followed the screams into a nearby forest, the search team stumbled across a pair of mating badgers.

A police spokesman said: "Nervous residents rang the police station and said they had heard several loud, frightened screams of a woman in a forest nearby.

"We scrambled a helicopter with night vision equipment and searched the forest but we only found wild animals going about their business.

"The mating calls of a badger during the mating season in July and August are easily mistaken for human screaming."