A dog disappeared from his California home. He was found 2,000 miles away

After disappearing during a storm at his Northern California home, a small corgi shepherd mix has been located two months later and more than 2,000 miles away in Illinois.

How the pooch made the cross-country trip is still a mystery.

Laura Flamion, an administrator at DuPage County Animal Services, on the outskirts of Chicago, said the dog was found on Sept. 28 and was turned in to the Itasca Police Department as a lost pet. There police officers used a scanner to check if the dog had a microchip.

Once the chip was scanned, Flamion said the microchip company reached out to the dog’s owner to let them know that their dog, affectionately named Opie, had been found in Illinois. Flamion said the owner told her she didn’t believe them. After all, the dog had been missing since July from its home in Bieber, Calif. — on the other side of the country.

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The dog’s owner, Ciara Babcock, 30, said she received an email from the microchip company but did not think it was real because the town where her dog was discovered was so far from California.

“I was like, ‘There’s no way that could be him,’” she said in a phone interview.

She said that when she called the police department in Itasca they didn’t have information on her dog. She informed the microchip company what the department had told her, prompting the company to reach out to the department and locate the detective overseeing the dog’s case. That detective then reached out to Babcock, even sending her photos of Opie.

“It just made me cry,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it was actually him.”

The police department transported the dog on Sept. 29 to DuPage County Animal Services to process the transfer. Babcock said she bought the next flight out of California to Illinois, rented a car and reunited with Opie on Wednesday.

“She wasted no time,” Flamion said.

When Babcock arrived, she said, she and the staff at the shelter cried.

“He was so excited. He was jumping up and down and making all kinds of cute little noises,” she said. “It was just a very beautiful moment.”

Babcock said Opie, a 5-year-old corgi shepherd mix, who she named after the character from “The Andy Griffith Show,” had escaped the property in July when a thunderstorm passed through their hometown of Bieber. She said the storm managed to blow some rooftops off. Bieber is a rural unincorporated community in Lassen County, northwest of Susanville.

Afraid of thunderstorms, Opie ran off and was last seen at a local gas station where the trail went cold. Flamion believed someone took the dog and it somehow ended up in Illinois. She said Opie was wearinga collar identifying the dog with a different name.

Back home, Babcock said she didn’t stop looking for Opie.

“We looked and we looked, we spent days looking for him around the valley,” Babcock said. “I contacted all the shelters and joined a lot of the lost pet pages in California, Oregon and Nevada.”

“Never in a million years did I think he’d make it all the way to Illinois, but that’s where he made it,” she said.

Flamion said it was great that the dog was microchip but also that the information on the chip was current. She said there have been times when pets are found and microchipped but that the pet has a new owner who is not listed under that microchip. She urges pet owners to check if a pet’s microchip is registered and if the information is current by going to the American Animal Hospital Assn.‘s website and using its microchip registry lookup tool.

Babcock said a veterinarian installed the chip when she got him fixed.

“It made all the difference because we never would have found him if it wasn’t for that,” she said.

On Friday, Babcock said she and Opie were in the state of Wyoming, making their way home.

“He’s a very well-traveled dog now,” she said.

Opie joins a long list of pets who have gone missing only to be found and reunited with owners.

Last year, a 2-year-old cat named Rayne Beau (pronounced rainbow), went missing when she slipped out of her collar and dashed toward the forest at the edge of Yellowstone National Park. The cat went missing for weeks until it was found in Northern California and reunited with the owners.