Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26553378-20170710215314/@comment-32325302-20170713214639

Not sure that I agree with the basis for the concept, given that Ents did wander for thousands of years... and eventually withdrew into Fangorn, leaving the rest of the world to go its own way. The one exception to this would be if the occasional Ent did go back out into the wider world to search for the Entwives (and it would likely be a younger Ent; Treebeard and the other old ones seemed to have given up on finding the Entwives themselves, having searched many times).

However, there IS one odd mention in the books: early on in Fellowship of the Ring, there's a tale going around a pub in the Shire that someone had seen a creature that sounds an awful lot like an Ent (or maybe an Entwife) striding through the Northernost part of the Shire (or on the moors north of it?). It's in the section where Sam is arguing at the pub with the miller's son.

I always guessed that it was a foreshadowing of the Ents, and most likely a sighting of an Entwife (since Entwives, according to Treebeard, would really like the Shire's orderly productive farming)... but who knows? Tolkien never went back to it, so far as I know.